Seeing and knowing: knowledge attribution versus stimulus control in adult humans (Homo sapiens)

Interest in cognition in nonhuman animals has inspired new approaches to discovering animals' ability to attribute knowledge to others (e.g., D. J. Povinelli, K. E. Nelson, & S. T. Boysen, 1990). The assumptions of such experiments were tested in this study by training a group of humans (Homo sapiens) to use accurate information provided by a confederate who was watching as 1 container among 4 was baited; a 2nd group was similarly trained to use accurate information provided by a confederate whose back was turned during baiting. On a single reversal trial, the roles of the 2 confederates were switched. Subjects were able to learn their respective tasks but attended to different aspects of the confederates, as revealed by the reversal trial. Although attributional interpretations can be applied to such data, many of the choices in this experiment can be explained more readily with the basic principles of contingency-based learning.