Comparing chimpanzees' preparatory responses to known and unknown future outcomes.

ABSTRACT: When humans plan for the future, we recognize not only that one particular event may occur, but that the future can have different, mutually exclusive possible outcomes. A recent study by Suddendorf et al (Suddendorf 2017 Biol. Lett.13, 20170170 (doi:10.1098/rsbl.2017.0170)) suggests that young children (less than 3 years) and apes lack this capacity, as demonstrated by their failure to cover each of two tube openings to ensure catching an object that would drop randomly from one of the tubes. Before drawing conclusions based on these negative results, however, it is important to assess subjects' failures and test the reliability of the task itself. To explore whether the apes' performance resulted from an inability to represent mutually exclusive futures or from extraneous factors related

SUBMITTER: Lambert ML 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170764 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature