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| Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium30 April-1 May 2004The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AHGreat Ape Cognition and the Evolutionary Roots of Human ImaginationProfessor Andrew Whiten1 and Thomas Suddendorf2 Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan, have brains approximately 2½ times larger than the average mammal, but only one third the size of humans’. For these and other reasons, great ape cognition is not expected to attain what human cognition does, yet has unique potential to inform us about the evolutionary foundations of the human mind, deriving from our shared ancestry. Here, we describe the evidence in ape behaviour for two aspects of imagination. The first is creativity: the capacity to generate relatively novel actions that go beyond what has been learned by prior experience. Several lines of evidence support the conclusion that great apes are particularly creative in this sense, by comparison with other primates. They ‘go beyond the information given’. The second sense of imagination is pretence, which goes beyond creativity; pretence involves holding in mind distinctions between the hypothetical and the real. There is some intriguing but quite limited evidence for this aspect of imagination in apes. We suggest this is a manifestation of a more general capacity for secondary representation, which underwrites a cluster of cognitive abilities that appear distinctive in apes, including means-end reasoning, mirror self-recognition and reading simple mental states. ReferencesSuddendorf, T. (1999). The rise of the metamind. In M.C. Corballis and S.E.G. Lea (Eds.) The Descent of Mind: Psychological Perspectives on Human Evolution. pp. 218-260. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suddendorf, T. and Whiten, A. (2001). Mental Evolution and Development: Evidence for Secondary Representation in Children, Great Apes and Other Animals. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 629-50. Whiten, A. (2000). Chimpanzee cognition and the question of mental re-representation. In Sperber, D. (Ed). Meta-representations. pp. 139-167. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1. Centre of Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JU. 2. School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia
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