I will outline my previous and ongoing studies to elucidate current issues and new challenges in animal cognition research. I wish to engage in a discussion with the team regarding our future research directions. A longstanding debate in this field revolves around the question of whether nonhuman animals can guide their behavior through an understanding of complex rules and concepts, as opposed to merely adhering to simple rules and regularities.
In our previous research, utilizing eye-tracking and the anticipatory-looking paradigm employed in infant studies, we observed that nonhuman great apes exhibit the ability to anticipate an agent's actions. This anticipation appears to be grounded in their comprehension of the agent's goals and beliefs, rather than being solely based on superficial behaviors displayed by the agent.
Our current challenges encompass replicating this paradigm within human populations and investigating task-specific limitations in this skill of action anticipation, particularly in differentiating between change-of-location and change-of-identity scenarios. This suggests that contextual information plays a significant role in the utilization of theory-of-mind, both in human and nonhuman animals.
I invite your insights and input on how we can experimentally test this aspect further. Furthermore, I will present our ongoing projects, which involve tracking attention during real-life social interactions across a wide range of species, opening up new possibilities for ecologically valid animal research contexts.