Evolving the Capacity to Understand Actions, Intentions, and Goals

We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by (a) going beyond the surface appearance of actions, attributing goals and intentions to the agent; (b) using details about the environment to infer when an action is rational or irrational; (c) making predictions about an agent's goal and the most probable act...