Comparison of breast cancer awareness and attitudes toward screenings in women with and without a family history.

From a very young age, humans are attuned to each other’s attentional focus (Behne et al. ; Carpenter et al. ; Tomasello ). Through language, gestures, and gaze we routinely solicit, direct, and share each other’s attention to interesting and important objects and events in the surrounding environment. One gesture that is central to this endeavor is referential pointing – a gesture that is abundant in human interactions, shared across many cultures worldwide, and considered a foundational building block of human communication (Brooks and Meltzoff ; Kita ; Tomasello ; Wobber et al. ). Over the past few decades, a great deal of research has been devoted to the question of whether non-human animals can understand human pointing, primarily using an experimental paradigm called the object-choice task. In this procedure, food is typically hidden inside one of two or more containers, and an experimenter points to indicate the correct container (or, in the case of dolphins, the experimenter points to a target object which does not in itself contain food, and rewards with food when it is chosen). A wide variety of animal species have been tested with this procedure – from apes to marine mammals to birds to goats (see reviews in (Krause et al. ; Miklósi and Soproni ; Mulcahy and Hedge ). Much of the scientific interest in this task was likely driven by the findings that chimpanzees and other apes often performed poorly (e.g., (Itakura et al. ; Povinelli et al. ; Tomasello et al. ) while species like horses, cats, goats, and especially dogs performed well [e.g., (Bray et al. ; Hare et al. ; Kaminski et al. ; Miklösi et al. ; Miklósi et al. ; Proops et al. ; Salomons et al. , )]. These highly replicable results were surprising because these domesticated species, which had previously not been considered of particular interest in comparative cognition, were not expected to outperform chimpanzees, which show great aptitude in other tasks requiring the use of social information (e.g., Bräuer et al. ). Evolutionary explanations arose, suggesting that perhaps chimpanzees failed because their cognition is adapted to competitive rather than cooperative interactions (Bräuer et al. ; Hare and Tomasello ), and/or that dogs and other domesticated species succeeded because the selection on temperament during the domestication process resulted in cognitive traits conducive to understanding human cooperative communication (Hare et al. , ; Hare and Tomasello ; Hernádi et al. ; Salomons et al. ). Thus, underlying many of these evolutionary hypotheses was the implicit or explicit suggestion that succeeding at the object choice task indicates a complex cognitive capacity to understand the cooperative communicative intent behind pointing. However, it has been noted by several researchers that success on the object choice task may not necessarily require such an understanding. They posit that through repetition, the point could be learned as a discriminative cue to elicit the specific conditioned response behavior needed to succeed (i.e., touching the indicated object, in most variations of the task) (Leavens et al. ; Povinelli et al. ; Shapiro et al. ).