When presented with the broken cloth problem, both human children and nonhuman great apes prefer to pull a continuous cloth over a discontinuous cloth in order to obtain a desired object resting on top. This has been interpreted as evidence that they preferentially attend to the functionally relevant cues of the task (e.g., presence or absence of a gap along the cloth). However, there is controversy regarding whether great apes’ behavior is under- pinned by causal knowledge, involving abstract concepts (e.g., sup- port, connection), or by perceptual knowledge, based on perception (e.g., contact, continuity). We presented chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children with two versions of the broken cloth problem. The Real condition, made with paper strips, could be solved based on either perceptual cues or causal knowledge. The Painted condition, which looked very similar, could be solved only by attending to perceptual cues. All groups mastered the Real condition, in line with previous results. Older children (3- and 4-year-olds) performed significantly better in this condition than all other groups, but the performance of apes and children did not differ sharply, with 2-year-olds and apes obtaining similar
results. In contrast, only 4-year-olds solved the Painted condition.