A Longitudinal Investigation of Chimpanzees' Understanding of Visual Perception

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Abstract
Seven chimpanzees were tested for their understanding of the intentional aspect of visual perception at 5 – 6 years of age and again at 7 years of age. They appeared not to understand that they should use a species‐typical, visually based begging gesture in front of someone who could see them, as opposed to someone who could not. Four experiments that were conducted when these same subjects were adolescents are reported here. The results suggest that there was no development between 5 and 9 years of age in the animals' understanding of visual perception as an internal state of attention. The subjects appeared to learn procedural, stimulus‐based rules related to the frontal orientation, the face, and the eyes of the experimenters. Even subjects most adept at these tasks appeared to rely on stimulus‐based rule structures, not an attribution of “seeing.”

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