Premium
Monkeys and apes: Are their cognitive skills really so different?
Author(s) -
Amici Federica,
Aureli Filippo,
Call Josep
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
american journal of physical anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 119
eISSN - 1096-8644
pISSN - 0002-9483
DOI - 10.1002/ajpa.21305
Subject(s) - comparative cognition , cognition , psychology , cognitive psychology , object (grammar) , task (project management) , comparative psychology , biology , artificial intelligence , computer science , neuroscience , management , economics
Differences in cognitive skills across taxa, and between monkeys and apes in particular, have been explained by different hypotheses, although these often are not supported by systematic interspecific comparisons. Here, we directly compared the cognitive performance of the four great apes and three monkey species (spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and long‐tailed macaques), differing in their phylogenetic‐relatedness and socioecology. We tested subjects on their ability to remember object locations (memory task), track object displacements (transposition task), and obtain out‐of‐reach rewards (support task). Our results showed no support for an overall clear‐cut distinction in cognitive skills between monkeys and apes as species performance varied substantially across tasks. Although we found differences in performance at tracking object displacements between monkeys and apes, interspecific differences in the other two tasks were better explained in terms of differential socioecology, especially differential levels of fission–fusion dynamics. A cluster analysis using mean scores of each condition of the three tasks for each species suggested that the only dichotomy might be between members of the genus Pan and the rest of the tested species. These findings evidence the importance of using multiple tasks across multiple species in a comparative perspective to test different explanations for the enhancement of specific cognitive skills. Am J Phys Anthropol 143:188–197, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.