Great apes think ahead

Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using
self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath's
research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden, is the
first to provide conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities
in non-human species. Their findings are published online this week in
Springer's journal, Animal Cognition.


The complex skill of future planning is commonly believed to be
exclusive to humans, and has not yet been convincingly established in
any living primate species other than our own. In humans, planning for
future needs relies heavily on two mental capacities: self-control or
the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards; and
mental time travel or the detached mental experience of a past or
future event.

In a series of four experiments, Mathias and Helena Osvath
investigated whether chimpanzees and orangutans could override
immediate drives in favor of future needs, and therefore demonstrate
both self-control and the ability to plan ahead, rather than simply
fulfill immediate needs through impulsive behavior.

Two female chimpanzees and one male orangutan, from Lund University
Primate Research Station at Furuvik Zoo, were shown a hose and how to
use it to extract fruit soup. They were then tempted with their
favorite fruit alongside the hose to test their ability to suppress
the choice of the immediate reward (favorite fruit) in favor of a tool
(the hose) that would lead to a larger reward 70 minutes later on (the
fruit soup). The apes chose the hose more frequently than their
favorite fruit suggesting that they are able to make choices in favor
of future needs, even when they directly compete with an immediate
reward.

New tools the apes had not encountered before were then introduced:
one new functional tool which would work in a similar way to the hose,
and two distractor objects. The apes consciously chose the new
functional tool more often and took it to the reward room later on,
where they used it appropriately, demonstrating that they selected the
tool based on its functional properties. According to the authors,
this indicates that the apes were pre-experiencing a future event i.e.
visualizing the use of the new tool to extract the fruit soup.

One of the decisive experiments excluded associative learning* as an
explanation of the results. Associative learning has been suggested to
account for the findings in previous planning studies on animals
(corvids and great apes), and therefore the previous studies have not
been generally accepted as evidence for non-human planning.

Source: Springer
http://www.physorg.com/news133006685.html