Abstract
Chimpanzees (Pan spp.) were tested on a habituation/dishabituation paradigm that was originally developed to test for comprehension of causality in very young human infants. Three versions of the test were used: a food item being moved by a hand, a human pushing another human off a chair to obtain a food item, and a film clip of natural chimpanzee behaviour (capturing and eating a monkey). Chimpanzees exhibited similar results to those obtained with human infants, with significantly elevated levels of looking on the dishabituation trials. Since the level of response was significantly greater on natural/unnatural sequences than on unnatural/natural sequences, we conclude that the chimpanzees were not responding just to novelty but rather to events that infringed their sense of natural causation.
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Acknowledgements
S.O. was supported by a studentship from the UK’s Science and Engineering Research Council. Sheila, Deirdre and Patrick O’Connell helped with making film 2. We are grateful to the BBC Natural History Unit, Bristol, and the film’s producer Alastair Fothersgill for the use of the clip from the film Too Close for Comfort, and to the BBC Television Centre, Kensington House, London, for the use of their editing suite. The study would not have been possible without the support and cooperation of Molly Badham and the staff at Twycross Zoo, to all of whom we are grateful. Finally, we are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments, which between them resulted in significant improvements to the manuscript. The experiments described in this paper comply with the current U.K. laws on animal experimentation.
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O’Connell, S., Dunbar, R.I.M. The perception of causality in chimpanzees (Pan spp.). Anim Cogn 8, 60–66 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-004-0231-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-004-0231-1