Individuals endowed with a ‘Theory of Mind’ (‘ToM’) understand themselves and others as agents whose actions are driven by unobservabl e psychological states. How and when human
infants come to such an understa nding has been extensively resear ched in the visual domain. In my dissertation, I addressed three gaps in the extant literature about what great apes’ know about others' visual perceptions and perceptual beliefs. In study 1, I investigated orangutans’ understanding of visual attenti on and others’ visual perspectives in a competitive situation. Overall, the results suggest that orangutans have a limited understanding of others’ perspectives, relying mainly on cues from facial and bodily orientation and egocentric ruleswhen making perspective judgements.
In study 2, I explored whether apes and 20 month old human infants requesting a desired object from a human experimenter would use communicative means to direct visual attention towards the object. While infants used pointing to alter the experimenter’s focus of attention, we found no evidence that apes’ employ their point gestures in this way. In study 3, I examined chimpanzees’ and 5.5 year old human children’s understanding of perceptual beliefs. By designing two novel false belief tasks which required reduced executive functioning, I attempted to find out whether chimpanzees’ historical failure in explicit false belief tasks was due to their lack of inhibitory control Neither the chimpanzees nor the 5.5 year-olds succeeded in the novel tasks.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:21314 |
| Date | 29 May 2018 |
| Creators | Gretscher, Heinz |
| Contributors | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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