What Young Chimpanzees Know about Seeing (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). This item is unavailable.What Young Chimpanzees Know about Seeing (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development)

Does a young chimpanzee's gaze subjectively link it to the outside world? Is seeing "about" something to this species? This volume reports the results of 15 studies conducted with chimpanzees and pre-school children. The findings provide little evidence that young chimpanzees understand seeing as a mental event. Even though young chimps spontaneously attend to and follow the visual gaze of others, they simultaneously appear oblivious to the attentional significance of that gaze. This interpretation is consistent with three different possibilities: chimpanzees may experience a delay in psychological development; alternatively, they may possess a different theory of attention, connected subjectively through other behavioural indicators; or the subjective understanding of visual perception may only be present in humans.

Previous experimental research has suggested that chimpanzees may understand some of the epitemological aspects of visual perception, such as how the perceptual act of seeing can have internal mental consequences for an individual′s state of knowledge. Other research suggests that chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates may understand visual perception at a simpler level; that is, they may at least understand seeing as a mental event that subjectively anchors organisms to the external world. However, these results are ambiguous and are open to several interpretations. In this Monograph, we report the results of 15 studies that were conducted with chimpanzees and preschool children to explore their knowledge about visual perception.