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Apes' use of iconic cues in the object-choice task

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Abstract

In previous studies great apes have shown little ability to locate hidden food using a physical marker placed by a human directly on the target location. In this study, we hypothesized that the perceptual similarity between an iconic cue and the hidden reward (baited container) would help apes to infer the location of the food. In the first two experiments, we found that if an iconic cue is given in addition to a spatial/indexical cue – e.g., picture or replica of a banana placed on the target location – apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas) as a group performed above chance. However, we also found in two further experiments that when iconic cues were given on their own without spatial/indexical information (iconic cue held up by human with no diagnostic spatial/indexical information), the apes were back to chance performance. Our overall conclusion is that although iconic information helps apes in the process of searching hidden food, the poor performance found in the last two experiments is due to apes' lack of understanding of the informative (cooperative) communicative intention of the experimenter.

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Notes

  1. Of course, if given enough trials many animals are able to learn to associate an arbitrary cue with the location of the food. But the point of the object choice task is that if the subject understands the meaning of the cue the experimenter is attempting to communicate, they should be successful in a very few trials – many fewer than if a totally arbitrary cue was used; for example, in Call and Tomasello (1998), using an arbitrary indexical marker, it took an average of 90 trials per subject to learn the cue.

  2. The two gorillas were used as pilot subjects and participated in a slightly different number and order of sessions: Object distractor Photo (N'kwango, six sessions; Ruby, seven sessions), Object distractor Replica (N'kwango and Ruby, three sessions), Fruit distractor Photo (N'kwango, six sessions; Ruby, four sessions), and Fruit distractor Replica (N'kwango, five sessions; Ruby, two sessions). Two bonobos (Kuno and Ulindi) stopped participating in some sessions and these sessions were excluded from the analysis (Kuno, two sessions with the Object distractor Replica and Fruit distractor Replica; Ulindi, two sessions with the Object distractor Replica).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center animal caretakers for their help in collecting the data. We thank Daniel Stahl for his statistical advice. The reported experiments comply with all laws in Germany regarding animals' experiments.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Esther Herrmann, Alicia P. Melis & Michael Tomasello

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  1. Esther Herrmann
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  2. Alicia P. Melis
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  3. Michael Tomasello
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Correspondence to Esther Herrmann.

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Herrmann, E., Melis, A.P. & Tomasello, M. Apes' use of iconic cues in the object-choice task. Anim Cogn 9, 118–130 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-005-0013-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-005-0013-4

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