When learning from others, human children tend to faithfully copy--or "overimitate"--the actions of a demonstrator, even when these actions are irrelevant for solving the task at hand. We investigate whether domesticated dogs ("Canis familiaris") and dingoes ("Canis dingo") share this tendency to overimitate in three…

We explored whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) share one important feature of human essentialist reasoning: the capacity to track category membership across radical featural transformations. Specifically, we examined whether monkeys--like children (Keil, 1989)--expect a transformed object to have the internal properties of its original…

A sensitivity to the intentions behind human action is a crucial developmental achievement in infants. Is this intention reading ability a unique and relatively recent product of human evolution and culture, or does this capacity instead have roots in our non-human primate ancestors? Recent work by Call and colleagues (2004) lends credence to the…