I don't have much direct evidence or many details to add, but I'm strongly of the opinion that everything is gradient-- animals do less than humans do, but they do, in many ways, the same things.

One major problem here is actually defining "awareness", "intelligence", "consciousness", and "theory of mind". If you define them circularly (only humans have those because they're uniquely human properties) it's not a very interesting point, and otherwise I think it's very challenging to come up with a reasonable, widely agreeable definition!

But questions like this certainly interest me, even if I don't know how to answer them.

Three year olds will invariably say that the other person will say 'coloured pencils'.  But around the age of 4, children will understand that another mind might hold false information, and they will say that the other person will guess Smarties, even though they are aware that it's just coloured pencils in the box.

This sounds like the perspective test that has been used to test the psychological capacity of infants. Put a child in a room, have the child state what is in front of it from two non-overlapping and independent perspectives (resulting in different objects being the correct answer) and then putting a doll that would have another perspective in the child's view and asking what the doll would see. I can't remember the details because it was many years ago I did this in a Psychology module but it addressed the issue of the concept of the self and how the mind develops an abstraction to consider another's beliefs.

But I must confess I do not recognise having seen a lot about a specific "Theory of Mind".
Could you give me the rundown in some for-dummies bullet points?

So, let's take the example setting of animals seeing their own reflections.
Would you say that an animal, let's say a dolphin, understanding that it is seeing its own reflection, is that also evidence of the theory of mind? Although as you categorised it, it involved the notion of establishing other members of the species as being their own selves and independent of the creature viewing the other ones, actively living in the wild and interacting with other animals, to then see something it can identify as itself; is that not deducible evidence that there is at least a basic function of differentiation going on?

I know you said the animal information isn't your strongpoint, but I'm just throwing the thought out there because it's not mine either. It is an interesting topic.

Cory, how did you mean that this sort of thinking connected to language? I'm interested to hear about that aspect.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Biv_8xjj8E

This is a very interesting documentary, especially the part about "perspective". I think it kind of parallells what lx was talking about.

Oooh, I'll have to look at that later too, thanks for the link!

The mirror recognition tests are interesting - there are some species that if you alter their appearance while they are asleep and unknowing, when they wake up they will look in the mirror for a long time, touch and themself and the altered area curiously as if they know it is them they are looking at.  Chimpanzees seem to think that at first it is another chimp, but then get very curious - I've seen video of Kanzi the bonobo with a flashlight and a handheld mirror inspecting as far as they can down their throat!

It's hard to know what to make of it though - is it really self awareness?  I was spending some time with a little 2 year old the other week, and she was on my lap and we were playing with my phone.  The picture setting was on, so we could see ourselves on the screen.  I was urging her to make funny faces with me to take pictures - like stick out our tongue, etc - and she found it entrancing and funny, and after a bit of encouraging made the faces - but I'm not sure she connected that what we were watching was us in real-time.

For example, after we took a few photos, she then requested "Take picture of [her name] in the park!"

And I laughed and said I can't, cause she's not in the park.  Puzzled, she than asked, "Take picture of [her name] in the garden!"

So I'm not quite sure she totally got it... though I'm also not sure she'd pass the mirror recognition test either.  Should have done some experiments....


As for the connection between this ability to think about thoughts and its connection to language, this is where I get really interested:

-Language and theory of mind seem to bootstrap each others' development in children.  For example, language is necessary to appreciate certain mental states of others.  Traits such as gaze following and joint attention seem to be important for both language learning and theory of mind development.

-In Astington and Jenkins (1999), they studied 60 children at three different points over 7 months, to assess their theory of mind ability and language ability.  They found earlier language ablility predicted later language test performance. They also divided the contributions towards semantic and syntactic ability and found it was specifically syntactic ability that predicted the theory of mind score.

Here's a .pdf document that summarizes the research well and gives a good literature review on the subject of theory of mind and language!
http://cls.psu.edu/pubs/pubs/Miller_06_offprint.pdf

I might be going on a bit off on a bit of a tangent here but has anyone else seen the videos of the monkeys in the cage when they are treated unfairly? I think it's from a TED talk. Capuchin monkeys are given cucumbers and if they can both see they both get cucumbers for carrying out a simple task, they are happy. As soon as one of them starts to get grapes (i.e. something nicer) the other one goes berserk in the cage. I think that notion of inequality and moreover rejection of the inequality is fascinating and a definite insight into the conceptual and mental states of how these creatures view their environments and social settings.

Here is the link if anyone is interested. It's only 02:38 - nothing feature-length.

Here is a question for everyone on this topic - why would an animal looking at themself and touching a mark made on their head while they were asleep mean that they had self awareness?  Could it be explained in another way?

plain curiosity? you need to add this test to check the result of the first:

do the first test.
then remove the mirror and bring another monkey from the same group which also had mark made without either monkeys being aware of it being done.
what does the first monkey do?