Mentalising mechanisms underly strategic coordination in Guinea baboons (Papio papio)

Is the ability to represent the world from the perspective of another (mentalising) confined to humans? Guinea baboons living in a social colony freely came to play a 2-players coordination game via touchscreen devices with any other baboon, or alone. In fact, in both conditions, they interacted with an identical Artificial Agent. Coordination with the Artificial Agent was more successful in the social than in the solo condition. A computational mentalising model accounted for baboon’s behaviour much better than simpler models that lacked mentalising components in the social condition while the same baboons used a simpler strategy when they played alone. Together, these findings indicate that computations required for mentalising are present in the Guinea baboon and provide an evolutionary advantage for efficient coordination.