Chris Krupenya

Look right at the camera.

Good boy.

You're doing so good.

Just a couple more.

We don't know exactly what he grasped, but you could ask him a question and often he would respond in the way that he should.

And one of the ways he could respond is through pointing and...

That's not a common behavior for apes.

They don't typically point in the way that humans do.

We think of imagination as being really fundamentally human.

In our minds, we can sort of depart from the here and now.

We can think about other worlds, other times, the past, the future, and even entertain, pretend, or imaginary scenarios.

So this feels like something that is sort of so fundamental to our mental experience as a species.

That allows us to, in many ways, ask him what he thinks or knows in more or less the same way that you might ask a human child.

Kids will have tea parties with their dolls.

They might have an imaginary friend.

They might play house with their friends.

So they're showing these roots of imagination within the first years of life.

And the way that we study that capacity in them is to engage them in the kinds of pretend scenarios that are familiar to them.

Where an experimenter will set up a tea set and then they'll sort of pretend to pour, you know, fake juice into various locations or pour it out and they'll ask the kid where's the imaginary juice.

And kids will often