Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) can use simple heuristics but fail at drawing statistical inferences from populations to samples.

ABSTRACT: Human infants, apes and capuchin monkeys engage in intuitive statistics: they generate predictions from populations of objects to samples based on proportional information. This suggests that statistical reasoning might depend on some core knowledge that humans share with other primate species. To aid the reconstruction of the evolution of this capacity, we investigated whether intuitive statistical reasoning is also present in a species of Old World monkey. In a series of four experiments, 11 long-tailed macaques were offered different pairs of populations containing varying proportions of preferred versus neutral food items. One population always contained a higher proportion of preferred items than the other. An experimenter simultaneously drew one item out of each population, hid them

SUBMITTER: Placi S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170548 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature