This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Oh.

That means danger to a chimpanzee.

Chimps use this call known as an alert who to warn each other about a potential threat like a dangerous snake on the forest floor.

And researchers have now used recordings of that call to get inside the chimpanzee mind.

There is more studies showing that various animals seem to be able to take another's perspective into account to a certain

extent they seem to be able to understand what another one sees or doesn't see for example.

Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary

Anthropology in Germany.

Crockford and her team traveled to Uganda's Boudongo Forest to study the ability of chimps to modify their calls based upon the knowledge of others.

They hit a fake snake on the ground and then use a loudspeaker to broadcast chim calls.

In some cases the speaker played that alarm call, the alert hoop, suggesting to listeners that nearby chimp was aware of the snake. But in other cases the speaker played a different kind of call, called a rest who.

This non-alarm told listeners of the chimp they were hearing was not aware of any snake danger.

And when the chimps who had heard the rest who came across the fake snake,

they gave ample warnings using both their alarm calls and body language.

But when chimps heard the alarm call before encountering the fake snake,

they produced fewer alert who's, apparently satisfied that their comrades were aware of the threat.

The study is in the journal Science Advances.

So we were able to sort of tease those things apart and show that the main motivation for their

calling didn't really fit with their own emotional state or their own habituation level to the snake.

Right?

So it really seemed that they were taking into account the others perspective.

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