Can animals play pretend? It took a tea party with a bonobo to find out.In a set of experiments, a team of researchers offered a bonobo named Kanzi invisible juice and grapes, presenting the tests as something of a game, akin to a child’s make-believe tea party.The results, published in the journal Science on Thursday, show that Kanzi could play along. The researchers concluded that the primate could imagine and track invisible juice being poured between a pitcher and bottles.AdvertisementAdvertisement“He’s able to follow along and track the location of a pretend object, but at the same time, he appreciates that it’s not actually there,” said Chris Krupenye, an author of the study and an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.In the past, scientists had assumed that the ability to pretend and consider multiple realities was unique to humans. But then some other observations of primates behaving like they were pretending — young chimpanzees playing with a “log doll” or moving imaginary blocks — called that idea into question. The new study provides the first evidence of an animal pretending in a situation researchers could control.“We think of our ability to imagine other worlds or other objects, or imagine futures, as one of these rich features of human mental life that are presumed to be unique to our species,” Krupenye said. But apes “might share some of the foundational cognitive machinery that will enable at least some degree of imagination.”For the new study, researchers modeled the experiments loosely after common childhood development tests.AdvertisementAdvertisement“Within the first years of life, you see kids engaging in pretend play,” Krupenye said — behaviors like having imaginary friends or tea parties with stuffed animals. “A lot of the studies in child psychology have focused on those kinds of scenarios.”The researchers staged three experiments for Kanzi. Fir …
