Do monkeys know that they are monkeys?

“It's a really interesting paper because it shows not only what the monkeys can't do, but what it takes for them to succeed,” says Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College in New York ... “That showed that they recognize themselves and know they are looking at their own bodies,” Poo says. read more

I don’t know if monkeys think in those terms. The phrase, “I a monkey” probably doesn’t enter their heads. They don’t speak our language and probably have no conception of letters, words, syllables, etc. They know they’re alive, and can identify others of their species. (A2A). read more

And as the evidence mounted, they drew careful inferences about what the monkeys know and how they think. In a new book called "How Monkeys See the World" (377 pages. University of Chicago Press. $24.95), the two primatologists tell their story. read more

Rosati and Santos devised a clever experiment to test whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys spontaneously know when they need more information. They gave a total of 120 monkeys a chance to search for food that was placed into a structure. In some cases, the structure was composed two cylinders arranged in a V-shape. read more