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Decoding Academia 36: Revenge of the Chimpanzees (YouTube) (Patreon)

Published:
2026-07-04 08:32:49
Imported:
2026-07
Tags:

Content

In this Decoding Academia episode, we venture into comparative psychology, where the central question is not whether great apes are clever but how much of the social world they understand before we start asking them for advice on how to deal with modern politics.

The focus is a fascinating line of work by Fumihiro Kano and colleagues on great apes, eye tracking, memory, anticipation, and Theory of Mind. By showing apes short videos and tracking where they look, researchers can ask whether they expect others to act based on what those others have seen, know, or falsely believe — which is either a remarkable window into the evolutionary roots of human social cognition, or the most elaborate way yet devised to ask a chimp what it thinks of a man in a costume.

We discuss what this kind of research might reveal about social intelligence across species: whether apes understand intentions, knowledge, and false beliefs; how their abilities compare with humans, dogs, and other animals; and why studying minds without language requires equal parts ingenuity, caution, and tolerance for participants who may simply decide the whole enterprise is beneath them.

There is also some discussion of the usual complications: small samples, difficult data, flexible analyses, replication, and the gap between a beautifully designed experiment and a result we should treat as settled fact. But the main story is the genuinely intriguing attempt to study Theory of Mind beyond humans.

Along the way, we discuss chimpanzee costumes, zoo life, dogs, and the disturbing possibility that crocodiles may be running more sophisticated cooperative hunting operations than most university committees.

Relevant paper for the episode:

Kano, F., & Hirata, S. (2015). Great apes make anticipatory looks based on long-term memory of single events. Current Biology, 25(19), 2513-2517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.004

Kano, F., & Call, J. (2017). Great ape social attention. In Evolution of the brain, cognition, and emotion in vertebrates (pp. 187-206). Tokyo: Springer Japan.

Files

Decoding Academia 36: Revenge of the Chimpanzees

In this Decoding Academia episode, we venture into comparative psychology, where the central question is not whether great apes are clever but how much of the social world they understand before we start asking them for advice on how to deal with modern politics. The focus is a fascinating line of work by Fumihiro Kano and colleagues on great apes, eye tracking, memory, anticipation, and Theory of Mind. By showing apes short videos and tracking where they look, researchers can ask whether they expect others to act based on what those others have seen, know, or falsely believe — which is either a remarkable window into the evolutionary roots of human social cognition, or the most elaborate way yet devised to ask a chimp what it thinks of a man in a costume. We discuss what this kind of research might reveal about social intelligence across species: whether apes understand intentions, knowledge, and false beliefs; how their abilities compare with humans, dogs, and other animals; and why studying minds without language requires equal parts ingenuity, caution, and tolerance for participants who may decide the whole enterprise is beneath them. There is also some discussion of the usual complications: small samples, difficult data, flexible analyses, replication, and the gap between a beautifully designed experiment and a result we should treat as settled fact. But the main story is the genuinely intriguing attempt to study Theory of Mind beyond humans. Along the way, we discuss chimpanzee costumes, zoo life, dogs, and the disturbing possibility that crocodiles may be running more sophisticated cooperative hunting operations than most university committees. Relevant paper for the episode: Kano, F., & Hirata, S. (2015). Great apes make anticipatory looks based on long-term memory of single events. Current Biology, 25(19), 2513-2517. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.004 Kano, F., & Call, J. (2017). Great ape social attention. In Evolution of the brain, cognition, and emotion in vertebrates (pp. 187-206). Tokyo: Springer Japan. Support the Show If you enjoy the show and want to support us, you can find us on Patreon, where we post bonus episodes and extra content: ► Patreon: / decodingthegurus Find Us Elsewhere ► Twitter/X: / guruspod ► Podcast (all platforms): https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/ ► Reddit: / decodingthegurus

Comments

RareTripleBait

I liked their brain-storming and voice-acting of a new pointer-based pixar dog movie 👈🐕

Foggers

Have there been any studies exploring if researchers are just wierd ?

Robert Andrews

I enjoyed listening to this one. Some of it reminds me of work I have read by Tomasello, particularly the useful explanation by Chris that conspecific means of the same species and allospecific which means similar species. I had assumed that conspecific actually referred to things that were being jointly attended to. Also, interesting point by Matt referring to the eye-tracking technology. I have been looking into (fixated on) doing some eye-tracking research myself. The glasses look expensive when I glanced at them (saccade ;)), and sound like they could be even more so with the subscription models, but the one I am looking at using is called webgazer by Brown University. I doubt it would be of much use to chimp researchers though as I think they have to be callibrated and that is something I don't think you can get chimps to do. Finally, on theory of mind, I enjoyed some of the similar stuff that was written about in Dunbar's book on gossip, grooming and the evolution of language. But it also reminded me of some interesting research that was done in which it was suggested that bilingual children may have an advanced theory of mind compared with monolingual children in the sense that they seem to figure out that different people understand different uses of words and accordingly select the language that gets best understood pretty well. I thought that this experiment was interesting, where bilingual and monolingual children were asked to pass objects to a "director" despite many of the objects being invisible to the director. The suggestion was that bilingual children would more quickly figure out what the director meant by "small car" if some of the cars were hidden from the director than the monolinguals. But I have not looked too deeply into whether or not it has been replicated.... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4791950/

Nancy Hale

Matt & Chris, could one of you fine gentlemen kindly share the original YT video on the study, the one that piqued Matt’s interest? Thank you 🙂.