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Can Apes Play Pretend? Scientists Use Imaginary Juice to Find Out
Kanzi the bonobo selected pretend juice 68% and real juice 80% of the time, indicating nonhuman primates may share imagination abilities with humans.
- On Thursday, the study in Science reported experiments suggesting Kanzi, male bonobo, can play pretend as researchers staged a juice party using two cups and an empty jug.
- Researchers set out to find if apes can act like something is real while knowing it is not, studying Kanzi, a male bonobo raised by humans via the Ape Initiative; he died last year at age 44.
- Kanzi pointed to the pretend cup about 68% of the time and chose real juice nearly 80% in the two-cup experimental setup; similar tests with fake grapes showed comparable results.
- Christopher Krupenye, cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, said the findings challenge assumptions about imagination, but other scientists urged caution, noting not all accept Kanzi's choices as full pretend play.
- Because bonobos share a common ancestor with humans about 7 million years ago, the findings may indicate imagination predates humans and open new research paths for conservation and comparative cognition.
30 Articles
30 Articles
A Chimp’s Pretend Tea Party Is Raising Questions About Imagination
By the age of two, most human kids have figured out pretend play. A cardboard box becomes a spaceship. An empty cup holds “tea.” Dolls become “babies.” Entire social worlds run on nothing but agreement and imagination. For a long time, that ability sat comfortably in the human-only column. Pretend play looked like a cognitive ability tied to language, culture, and creativity. Chimps were clever, sure, but imagination felt like a different tier. …
Can apes play pretend? Scientists use an imaginary tea party to find out - WXXV News 25
By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN NEW YORK (AP) — By age 2, most kids know how to play pretend. They turn their bedrooms into faraway castles and hold make-believe tea parties. The ability to make something out of nothing may seem uniquely human — a bedrock of creativity that’s led to new kinds of art, music and more. Now, for the first time, an experiment hints that an ape in captivity can have an imagination. “What’s really exciting about this work is …
The ability to imagine was long thought to be a uniquely human trait. But a new study published this week in the journal Science presents experimental evidence that apes also have the ability to pretend. The study’s findings suggest that apes have imagination—a skill that may have been inherited from our common ancestors. “This is one of those things that we assume is unique to our species,” Christopher Krupenier, a cognitive scientist at Johns …
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