What kinds of minds exist in the natural world? This project from Christopher Krupenye and team at Social & Cognitive Origins Group at Johns Hopkins University aims to  articulate a new approach to recognizing intelligences by defining two critical distinctions in the kinds of minds with which we share the world: minds that seek to explain the world around them versus those that only predict it, and minds that are aware of and curious about other minds versus those that understand others more superficially.

With a theory-driven experimental approach applied to two very different taxonomic groups — great apes and domestic dogs — this work investigates whether animals seek explanations for others’ behavior beyond mere prediction, probing the depth of social cognition across species. Specifically, the project asks: do chimpanzees, bonobos, and dogs investigate hidden mechanisms when an actor’s success violates intuitive mental-state expectations, such as finding food without apparent knowledge? And does explanation-seeking reflect a truly causal theory of mind, or is it driven by superficial associations?

The core hypotheses are that (1) some animals are capable of generating and seeking explanations for surprising events in the world around them, and (2) variation across species in the presence or absence of such cognition contributes to the existence of different forms of theory of mind. Apes, for example, may possess an ability to generate and evaluate mental state-guided explanations for others’ behavior. Dogs, by contrast, may have become astute readers of human behavior through domestication, but lack an explanatory understanding of the mental causes behind that behavior.

This work hopes to yield new paradigms for studying nonverbal explanation-seeking, producing empirical and theoretical discoveries with relevance for both academic and public audiences. The findings aim to generate insights into how dogs understand their human partners, and how apes reason about the social world, opening new avenues of inquiry into animal cognition and the evolutionary origins of human social intelligence.

Photo: Amalia Bastos