# Chimpanzee minds suspiciously human **Abstract:** representations of the behavior of others. Each instance of another chimpanzee pursing his lips, hair bristling, need not be separately represented and understood. Rather, a concept of ‘threat display’ can be formed. Further, having witnessed a ‘threat display,’ the chimpanzee probably has a good sense of the sorts of things that will follow (‘charging’, ‘being hit’, etc.). This ‘behavioral abstraction hypothesis’ posits that chimpanzees: (a) construct abstract categories of behavior, (b) make predictions about future behaviors that follow from past behaviors, and (c) adjust their own behavior accordingly. The question of theory of mind, then, becomes an additional, and quite focused one: do chimpanzees construe behavior in terms of mental states? Is the concept of ‘gaze’, for example, represented in both a behavioral code (abstracted spatio-temporal invariances) and a nonbehavioral code (an attributed experience of ‘seeing’)? Although the former may well do much, if not most, of the actual work in supporting our behavioral interactions with others (and hence ought to be a greater focal point for research), if the latter is not present, then we have no business invoking the phrase ‘theory of mind’ [6]. Most scholars agree that despite cultural diversity, the core ability to think about mental states is a universal feature of the human mind [7]. Crucially, however, http://tics.trends.com 1364-6613/03/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10 **Authors:** [[Daniel J. Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk]]