"Amalia Bastos first met Kanzi the bonobo in 2023. Bastos was starstruck, she recalls: Kanzi was famous for learning how to communicate with humans using a keyboard of symbols. Upon first seeing Bastos, Kanzi immediately pointed at her and another scientist. Then the ape pointed to his lexigramsthe symbols he used to communicateselecting the icons for chase and tickle. The two researchers obliged, pretending to chase and tickle each other."
"[Kanzi] found that highly entertaining, Bastos recalls. And I was like, We're not actually chasing or actually tickling each other, but he seems satisfied with this sort of puppet show that he's put together.' Bastos, then an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, had traveled to the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative in Iowa with a group of researchers to observe and interact with Kanzi and the other animals at the center."
Amalia Bastos encountered Kanzi, a bonobo skilled at communicating via a keyboard of symbols, and observed him initiate and enjoy pretend interactions. Kanzi selected lexigrams representing chase and tickle and seemed satisfied with a puppet-show-style pretend exchange. Bastos adapted developmental psychology methods used with children to design controlled tests of pretend-object understanding. In those tests Kanzi indicated recognition of pretend objects and could distinguish pretend actions from real actions. The results show that at least one bonobo possesses mental representations that extend beyond the immediate here and now, suggesting rich imaginative capacities in nonhuman apes.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]