"In the first experiment, a scientist would offer a verbal prompt: "Kanzi, let's play a game! Let's find the juice!" They would then place two empty transparent cups on a table and pretend to fill them from an empty transparent pitcher, with another verbal prompt ("Kanzi, look!"). The scientist would pretend to pour the "juice" in one of the cups back into the pitcher, placing the pitcher under the table. Then they asked, "Kanzi, where's the juice?" and recorded which cup the bonobo pointed to first."
""If Kanzi could only track reality (that both cups were empty), he should have chosen at chance between the two options, whereas if his choices were guided by stimulus enhancement, he should have selected the incorrect cup that had been 'emptied' above chance," the authors wrote. "In contrast, if Kanzi could represent the pretend juice, he should have chosen above chance the cup containing the 'imaginary' juice, the empty cup that had not been 'poured' back into the pitcher. That is exactly what Kanzi did." Kanzi selected the correct cup 34 out of 50 times (68 percent)."
Some researchers treat animal behavior cautiously because animals might follow behavioral cues, such as gaze direction, rather than engage in make-believe. Kanzi is a 43-year-old bonobo at the Ape Initiative who responds to verbal prompts by pointing or using a lexigram of over 300 symbols and has shown anecdotal pretense. In one experiment, a scientist pretended to pour imaginary juice between two empty transparent cups and then pretended to return juice from one cup to the pitcher. Observers recorded which cup Kanzi pointed to first when asked where the juice was. Kanzi chose the cup containing the "imaginary" juice 34 out of 50 times (68 percent).
Read at Ars Technica
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