Upcoming: Can Great Apes Read Your Mind?
with Chris Krupenye
@Chris Krupenye
11 July 2026, 16:00 GMT/ 12:00 EDT/ 09:00 PDT
Can Great Apes Read Your Mind?
Humans are defined in no small part by the complexity of our social lives, and the cognitive mechanisms we possess for making sense of our social worlds. Central among these capacities is theory of mind: the ability to make inferences about the mental states, like goals and beliefs, that motivate other people's actions. Theory of mind plays an important role in human culture, cooperation, and morality, and as such, has long been at the heart of debates about what makes the human mind unique. In fact, the term theory of mind was actually coined in 1978 by Premack and Woodruff to ask whether our closest relative, the chimpanzee, might have one.
In this talk, Chris Krupenye presents a series of experimental studies with chimpanzees and bonobos, bearing on this classic question about whether humans are the only creatures capable of peering into others' minds.
About the Speaker
Chris Krupenye, PhD is a cognitive scientist who studies how humans and other animals think. His work exposes the brilliance of other creatures as well as what makes the human mind unique. Chris is an assistant professor of psychological & brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Social & Cognitive Origins Group and the Canine Minds Collaborative. He is interested in the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to mental life, including theory of mind, social knowledge, metacognition, imagination, episodic memory, and planning. His group develops non-invasive cognitive games to investigate these capacities across species, with a special focus on the great apes, other primates, and domestic dogs.
