IF YOU want to attract a monkey’s attention, try copying everything it does. But don’t expect the monkey to play along with the game because it won’t understand why it finds your antics so captivating.
Experiments with 10 pig-tailed macaques show that they notice when they are being imitated, but probably don’t have the complexity of thought to register how or why someone is copying them.
Annika Paukner of the University of Stirling, UK, and colleagues in Italy gave each of the monkeys a wooden cube to play with. Two people in front of the cage handled matching cubes. One…
