This “error detection” addition is the key to good directions.

I don’t quite get why we compare something like Theory of Mind (that was developed for humans in the first place) against the experience of non-primates who adapt relative to their environment.

Cats for example sometimes know where their prey plan to escape to. It doesn’t involve empathy, but what use would a cat (or squid, giraffe etc) have for empathy anyway? They still have adaptations that help them read signals from non-self individuals. Maybe it’s a Relative Theory of Mind?

Directions (and instructions in general) are given through language, which means they are expressed through our explicit memory system. However, their purpose is to guide actions and movements, which are usually dependent on our implicit memory system. So, you are trying to guide one system (implicit memory) through the use of another system (explicit memory).

This same problem affects many instruction manuals. They try to explain through language something that is done through actions. To overcome this, many people ignore the manuals and try to find out how to do things by trying or by asking someone else that already knows how to do it. The current popularity of troubleshooting videos is possibly a consequence of this, as you don’t need direct contact with some expert, you just need to find the video.