Humans are uniquely impressive cooperators, and yet it remains unclear exactly which cognitive and motivational mechanisms set human cooperation apart. Our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, have also demonstrated a range of prosocial tendencies across experimental and observational contexts. Critically, however, we do not yet know whether their helping behavior, like that of humans, is motivated by an acute sensitivity to others’ needs. We investigated this question in a novel eye-tracking task, with a large sample of captive apes. While their gaze and pupils were tracked, apes viewed controlled videos of an agent reaching toward objects that ultimately would or would not be attainable without help. If apes are acutely sensitive to others’ needs, we predicted that they would show greater pupil dilation (arousal) when the agent could not complete a goal on his own. Our findings shed light on the mechanistic and evolutionary bases of human prosociality and empathy.

Bonobos' (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) understanding of, and pupillary responses to, others' needs

Humans are ultra-social: they spontaneously incorporate others’ mental states into their action-planning (Kaminski et al.,2008), and altercentric: their behavior is influenced by others’ perspectives, even perspectives irrelevant to their instrumental goal (Kampis & Southgate, 2020). Recent evidence suggests that similarly to human infants, non-human great apes anticipate others’ actions based on their beliefs (Krupenye et al.,2016; Kano et al, 2019); raising the critical question whether altercentrism is uniquely human. 
In two experiments, we tested chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans in a manual search paradigm adapted from Mendes et al. (2008). These experiments replicated findings demonstrating apes’ first-person object-tracking abilities. Experiment 1 found no evidence for altercentrism: apes’ search behavior was not spontaneously modulated by another agent’s beliefs (unlike 14-month-old human infants; Kampis & Kovács, 2020). Experiment 2 found tentative evidence that apes inferred a person’s actions based on her beliefs, and adapted their own actions based on this information.

Great apes’ understanding of others’ beliefs in two manual search tasks


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Poster Session 1 -  B: Animal Cognition and Communication

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

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CogSci 2021

The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

Christopher Krupenye

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Bonobos' (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees' (Pan troglodytes) understanding of, and pupillary responses to, others' needs

Great apes’ understanding of others’ beliefs in two manual search tasks

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