The goggles experiment: can chimpanzees use self-experience to infer what a competitor can see?

• Published in: Animal behaviour Vol. 105; pp. 211 - 221
• Main Authors: Karg, Katja, Schmelz, Martin, Call, Josep, Tomasello, Michael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Elsevier Ltd 01.07.2015; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Ltd
• Subjects: Animal behavior; Animal cognition; chimpanzee; experience projection; Experiments; humans; Monkeys & apes; Pan troglodytes; perspective taking; social cognition; theory of mind; chimpanzee; experience projection; social cognition; theory of mind; perspective taking
• ISSN: 0003-3472; 1095-8282
• DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.04.028

In two experiments, we investigated whether chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, can use self-experience to infer what another sees. Subjects first gained self-experience with the visual properties of an object (either opaque or see-through). In a subsequent test phase, a human experimenter interacted with the object and we tested whether chimpanzees understood that the experimenter experienced the object as opaque or as see-through. Crucially, in the test phase, the object seemed opaque to the subject in all cases (while the experimenter could see through the one that they had experienced as see-through before), such that she had to use her previous self-experience with the object to correctly infer whether the experimenter could or could not see when looking at the object. Chimpanzees did not attribute their previous self-experience with the object to the experimenter in a gaze-following task (experiment 1); however, they did so successfully in a competitive context (experiment 2). We conclude that chimpanzees successfully used their self-experience to infer what the competitor sees. We discuss our results in relation to the well-known ‘goggles experiment’ and address alternative explanations. •We gave chimpanzees two novel tests of mindreading.•Chimpanzees successfully use self-experience to predict what a competitor can see.•Apes thus show that they attribute their own (perceptual) experience to others.