[ 18 ] study, but the current studies were conducted before that one. “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. In both conditions this is the same empty box; all that differs is the experimenter’s belief about what is in it. First a person put an object in one of two boxes. “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. First, participants received two more training trials with boxes containing an object on each side, as in the Buttelmann et al. 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. 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. Then she opened the lid of the other box, put the object in, closed the lid, and locked that box. In this condition, the assistant behaved “sneakily,” and looked furtively at the door to the room whenever a lid was opened and the object was taken out of or put into a box to ensure that E was not watching. What followed was identical in both conditions: E stood behind the empty box (the one he had originally put the object in) and unsuccessfully tried to open it by pulling the handle (three short pulls), showing effort. If participants unlocked a box, E pulled back both boxes, opened the lid of the box participants had unlocked, and looked into it, saying something like “That is how the box opens” or “Oh, the object is in here now.” He then left the room without ever touching the object in the box. If participants chose a box (i.e., they touched the bolt) but did not successfully unlock the lid, E pulled both boxes back and tried to open the chosen box. The researchers recently reported their findings in PLOS ONE.
– 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.)