Most of us spend the day tossing out words without thinking about how they fit together. We text, we talk, we grumble in traffic. Every sentence quietly combines pieces of meaning. Now, scientists ...

For a long time, imagination was considered a human endeavor. When we’re children, we invent invisible friends and turn ...

Can animals play pretend? It took a tea party with a bonobo to find out. In a set of experiments, a team of researchers offered a bonobo named Kanzi invisible juice and grapes, presenting the tests as ...

A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We ...