Until now, researchers believed great apes did not have the capacity to understand people's intent (AFP Photo/GUILLAUME SOUVANT) 
 
 Miami (AFP) - Orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos are the nearest relatives of humans in the primate world, and like us, they can tell when a person is wrong in their beliefs, researchers said Wednesday. 
 
 Great apes were also willing to help a person who was mistaken about the location of an object, according to the study in the journal PLOS ONE. 
 
 "This study shows for the first time that great apes can use an understanding of false beliefs to help others appropriately," said by David Buttelmann from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. 
 
 Researchers used a test developed for human babies, about 18 months of age, to determine if they could understand when a person held a false belief -- a mark of advanced social cognition. 
 
 A person would place an object on one of two boxes, while a great ape looked on. 
 
 For some of the tests, the original person would step away, while another person took the object out of the box and put it into another box. 
 
 When the original person came back, they tried to open the first box, where they believed the object to be, not realizing it had been moved. 
 
 This was known as the "false-belief" portion of the study. For other parts, the person stayed in the room and could see when the object was moved. 
 
 A total of 34 great apes -- chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans -- took part in the research at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany. 
 
 In the false belief portion, the apes chose the correct box significantly more often than chance. 
 
 Researchers also discovered that great apes, like human infants, "were more likely to help the person find the object when he had a false belief about which box the object was in," said the report. 
 
 Until now, researchers believed great apes did not have this capacity to understand the intent of people, or to "read minds," so to speak. 
 
 "Apes are able to use this understanding in their social interactions," concluded the study. 
 
 "If supported by further research, the apparent difference between great ape and human social cognition would thus lie not in their basic capacity to 'read' other minds, but elsewhere." ||||| Great apes may be even more like us than we thought. We already knew that they can understand someone else’s goals, intentions and desires. However, scientists have long believed that they lack the capacity for understanding what others believe — a mark of advanced social cognition thought to separate people from great apes. But now new research overturns this belief. 
 
 “Social cognition is the sum of cognitive abilities necessary to survive in a social world,” says David Buttelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “Whenever individuals interact, they need to understand the gestures, motivations, feelings, intentions, and beliefs of their partners.” 
 
 Using a test developed for human infants, Buttelmann and his colleagues assessed whether chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans could understand whether someone else’s beliefs were true or false. The researchers recently reported their findings in PLOS ONE. 
 
 First a person put an object in one of two boxes. Then a second person switched the object to the other box and locked both boxes. 
 
 For the “true belief” test, the first person watched the switch — so he knew where the object was and thus had a true belief. 
 
 For the “false belief” test, however, he left the room during the switch — so while he thought he knew where the object was, he was mistaken and thus had a false belief. 
 
 In both cases, the person then tried to open the box where he had originally put the object. And the apes, who knew how to unlock the boxes, could decide which one to open. 
 
 The researchers found that, like human infants, great apes were more likely to help the person find the object when he had a false belief about where it was. This suggests the apes used their understanding of his beliefs about reality to decide whether to help him. 
 
 Buttelmann says great apes enjoy the beliefs test, which is voluntary; “They only play with us if they are in the mood, so we have to present them with interesting games.” 
 
 Now he wants to extend this work to other animals. “I would love to develop interactive false-belief tests for other species,” Buttelmann says. “This way we will be able to track the development of our own mind and understand, at some point, what made us uniquely human.” 
 
 Research Article: Buttelmann D, Buttelmann F, Carpenter M, Call J, Tomasello M (2017) Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0173793. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173793 
 
 Image Credit: Buttelmann et al (2017) ||||| Tokyo (AFP) - Dogs do not like people who are mean to their owners, Japanese researchers said Friday, and will refuse food offered by people who have snubbed their master. 
 
 The findings reveal that canines have the capacity to co-operate socially -- a characteristic found in a relatively small number of species, including humans and some other primates. 
 
 Researchers led by Kazuo Fujita, a professor of comparative cognition at Kyoto University, tested three groups of 18 dogs using role plays in which their owners needed to open a box. 
 
 In all three groups, the owner was accompanied by two people whom the dog did not know. 
 
 In the first group, the owner sought assistance from one of the other people, who actively refused to help. 
 
 In the second group, the owner asked for, and received, help from one person. In both groups, the third person was neutral and not involved in either helping or refusing to help. 
 
 View gallery Canines have the capacity to co-operate socially -- a characteristic found in a relatively small num … 
 
 Neither person interacted with the dog's owner in the control -- third -- group. 
 
 After watching the box-opening scene, the dog was offered food by the two unfamiliar people in the room. 
 
 Dogs that saw their owner being rebuffed were far more likely to choose food from the neutral observer, and to ignore the offer from the person who had refused to help, Fujita said. 
 
 Dogs whose owners were helped and dogs whose owners did not interact with either person showed no marked preference for accepting snacks from the strangers. 
 
 "We discovered for the first time that dogs make social and emotional evaluations of people regardless of their direct interest," Fujita said. 
 
 If the dogs were acting solely out of self-interest, there would be no differences among the groups, and a roughly equal number of animals would have accepted food from each person. 
 
 "This ability is one of key factors in building a highly collaborative society, and this study shows that dogs share that ability with humans," he said. 
 
 The trait is present in children from the age of about three, the research papers said. 
 
 Interestingly, noted Fujita, not all primates demonstrate this behaviour. 
 
 "There is a similar study that showed tufted capuchins (a monkey native to South America) have this ability, but there is no evidence that chimpanzees demonstrate a preference unless there is a direct benefit to them," he told AFP. 
 
 The study will appear in the science journal "Animal Behaviour" to be published later this month by Amsterdam-based Elsevier, he said.
– Now even the great apes are getting in on debunking "fake news"—or, to be more specific, fake beliefs. German researchers have found that the primates can tell when a human is wrong about something, and can even help to remedy the situation, which in this case was assisting a human in finding an object mistakenly believed to be in one location but actually in another, AFP reports. The study published in the PLoS One journal, which revamped a test usually administered to 18-month-old human babies, sought to see if the 34 chimps, bonobos, and orangutans at Germany's Leipzig Zoo could understand if a human was harboring a false belief, believed to be a sign of advanced social cognition apes weren't previously believed to possess. A press release lays out the experiment, which involved the apes watching while Person A put an object under one of two boxes, then either stayed in the room and watched (the "true belief" part of the experiment) or left the room (the "false belief" part) while a second person then moved the object to the second box. In both cases, Person A then went to the original box to try to open it, ostensibly not knowing in the false-belief cases the object had been moved—and in those false-belief cases, the apes, who'd been observing the whole thing and had been trained to unlock the boxes, tried more often than would be attributed to chance to guide the humans to where the object really was. These results are said to be the first to show that apes can use this "mind-reading" and apply it to their social interactions, the researchers write. (An animal expert says it's moral to keep apes in a zoo.)