Bonobo Kanzi Demonstrates Imagination in Tea-Party Experiments

Researchers at Johns Hopkins conducted tea‑party–style tests with Kanzi the bonobo to test if apes can imagine pretend objects. He consistently indicated the locations of pretend juice and pretend grapes and could distinguish pretend from real items, suggesting that imagination and pretense are not uniquely human. The study, published in Science, argues that enculturated apes may have a mental life that extends beyond the present and lays groundwork for exploring future thinking and others’ minds in nonhuman primates.