Abstract
From an early age, children explore their environment in a way suggesting that they reason about causal variables and seek causal explanations. Indeed, following extensive studies of problem-solving abilities in chimpanzees, Povinelli (Folk Physics for Apes, Oxford University Press, 2000) proposed that this ability to reason about unobservable variables is unique to humans. Following on from this, Povinelli and Dunphy-Lelii (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(2), 187-195, 2001) addressed the question whether chimpanzees would explore objects with the aim of elucidating unobservable and surprising object properties. Chimpanzees, unlike preschool children, did not show increased object exploration following a change in the unobservable properties of an object. We critically discuss these findings and argue that more research using a greater variety of methods and with a larger number of species is required to support the hypothesis that only humans engage in explanation seeking. We conclude by highlighting avenues for future research based on developmental and comparative research aimed at object exploration and information seeking conducted since the original investigation by Povinelli and Dunphy-Lelii.
Highlights
Most contemporary comparative cognitive research has been devoted to the question what kind of information animals represent and to what extent they can make inferences about their (physical and social) environment based on these representations (for recent reviews, see Seed & Mayer, 2017; Völter & Call, 2017)
Most contemporary comparative cognitive research has been devoted to the question what kind of information animals represent and to what extent they can make inferences about their environment based on these representations
In the literature on chimpanzees’ physical cognition, Daniel Povinelli’s Folk Physics for Apes (2000) has been an influential representative of this line of research focusing on the question whether chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) reason about unobservable variables such as weight or others’ mental states to generate predictions about the events they observe in their environment
Summary
Most contemporary comparative cognitive research has been devoted to the question what kind of information animals represent and to what extent they can make inferences about their (physical and social) environment based on these representations (for recent reviews, see Seed & Mayer, 2017; Völter & Call, 2017). Keywords – Explanation seeking, Hypothesis testing, Chimpanzees, Causal cognition, Folk physics, Object exploration
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