Cognitive Empathy

• Develops during pre-school and primary school.

• Main Ingredient: Language 📝! Helps understand feelings & perspectives.

Age 4-5: Theory of Mind starts popping! 🎈

Animals, especially primates 🐵, can help us understand this development.

• Experiment: Chimpanzee watches human problems on TV 📺.
• Problems: From stuck bananas 🍌 to cold heaters ❄️.
• Chimpanzee's task: Pick the right solution photo! 📷
• Result: Chimp was on fire! 🔥 Always chose the right solution!

• Contradictory findings. Maybe chimps are just good guessers?
• Example: Chimps couldn't tell if a human with a bucket on their head was looking at them or not! 🪣😂
• Some scientists think chimps might not understand human thoughts, just behaviors.

• Question: Do chimps understand behaviors OR intentions?
• Call & Tomasello’s idea: Test chimps with novel, unlearned scenarios.
• Results: Chimps do get the intention behind actions! 🎯
• Fun Fact: They even mimic unusual human behaviors, like using a leg to switch on a light! 🦵💡

• Humans think based on beliefs, even if they're wrong.
• Chimps? They only act on what's real!
• Example: If a chimp knows something is false, they can't predict actions based on that belief.

• Chimps and humans share ancestors! Learning from them helps understand us.

• Chimps & humans have a similar brain structure. Big clues there!

• What happens during a species' evolution (phylogeny) often repeats in individual development (ontogeny).
• So, studying animals can give hints about human kids!