Are out primate cousins 'conscious'?
Pennisi, E.
Science 284(5423): 2073-2076
1999
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 10409060 Document Number: 506120
Researchers are devising ingenious new ways of testing primates for some of the solid abilities long considered to be prerequisites for consciousness. These abilities include overcoming instinctive behavior; being aware of, and differentiating between, oneself and others; and most sophisticated, understanding that others also have mental states and thoughts. In January, for example, Marc Hauser of Harvard University and Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom reported experiments at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Denver testing whether primates and children could overcome their instinctive anticipation of where a ball or a food pellet would drop; the children made many of the same mistakes as Cottontop tamarins and on some tasks fared worse. Andrew Whiten of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, says that what researchers learn about our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, will help us reconstruct the evolution of the human mind.