%0 Journal Article
%A Call, Josep
%+ Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Beyond learning fixed rules and social cues : abstraction in the social arena : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0010-062B-A
%F EDOC: 121028
%R 10.1098/rstb.2003.1318
%D 2003
%* Review method: peer-reviewed
%X Abstraction is a central idea in many areas of physical comparative cognition such as categorization, numerical competence or problem solving. This idea, however, has rarely been applied to comparative social cognition. In this paper, I propose that the notion of abstraction can be applied to the social arena and become an important tool to investigate the social cognition and behaviour processes in animals. To make this point, I present recent evidence showing that chimpanzees know about what others can see and about what others intend. These data do not fit either low-level mechanisms based on stimulus-response associations or high-level explanations based on metarepresentational mechanisms such as false belief attribution. Instead, I argue that social abstraction, in particular the development of concepts such as seeing in others, is key to explaining the behaviour of our closest relative in a variety of situations.
%K theory of mind, social cognition, mindreading, social intelligence, chimpanzees
%J Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences
%V 358
%N 1435
%& 1189
%P 1189 - 1196
%I Royal Society
%C London
%@ 0962-8436