ABSTRACT
Interest in the scientific investigation of animal mental states has been rekindled recently in several disciplines: philosophy of mind, experimental and comparative psychology, and Griffin's creation of the new enterprise of cognitive ethology. As an approach to this problem, in the present research a low-level intentional stance was assumed (as described by Dennett, 1983, 1987; Bennett, 1976, this volume; Searle, 1980). I suggest that for some species, a bird engaged in injury feigning wants to lead an intruder away from its offspring and acts as needed (within limits) to achieve that end. Field experiments were conducted with piping plovers and Wilson's plovers using human intruders to approach the eggs or young. Data were gathered on each bird's direction of display, monitoring of the intruder, and flexibility of behavior in response to changing behavior by the intruder. Other experiments investigated the birds' responsiveness to attention of an intruder (interpreted as direction of intruder's eye gaze) and the birds' ability to learn to discriminate between potentially “safe” versus “dangerous” intruders.
