Human beings have remarkable skills of self-control, but the evolutionary origins of these skills are unknown. Here we compare children at 3 and 6 years of age with one of humans' two nearest relatives, chimpanzees, on a battery of reactivity and self-control tasks. Three-year-old children and chimpanzees were very similar in their abilities to…

In all human cultures, people gesture iconically. However, the evolutionary basis of iconic gestures is unknown. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos, and 2- and 3-year-old children, learned how to operate two apparatuses to get rewards. Then, at test, only a human adult had access to the apparatuses, and participants could instruct her about…

Domestic dogs comprehend human gestural communication in a way that other animal species do not. But little is known about the specific cues they use to determine when human communication is intended for them. In a series of four studies, we confronted both adult dogs and young dog puppies with object choice tasks in which a human indicated one of…

A milestone in human development is coming to recognize that how something looks is not necessarily how it is. We tested appearance-reality understanding in chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") with a task requiring them to choose between a small grape and a big grape. The apparent relative size of the grapes was reversed using magnifying and…

Chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and bonobos ("Pan paniscus") (Study 1) and 18- and 24-month-old human children (Study 2) participated in a novel communicative task. A human experimenter (E) hid food or a toy in one of two opaque containers before gesturing towards the reward's location in one of two ways. In the Informing condition, she attempted…