Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Does having eyes on you change how well you perform a task? If so, you’re not alone because new research has found the same for chimpanzees.
The study in the journal iScience has found chimps’ cognitive performance can be influenced by the presence of audience members.
The study analysed data from 6 captive chimps that performed 3 computer tasks of varying difficulty in the presence of humans. It found that chimpanzees performed better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters watching them increased.
“It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless!” says Christen Lin of Kyoto University in Japan, senior author of the study.
“One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences, even depending on the difficulty of the task, suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected.”
Chimpanzee Ayumu performing task 3, involving pressing numbers in ascending order while recalling which number was located where. Credit: Dr Tetsuro Matsuzawa
In contrast, chimps performed worse at the easiest task when being watched by more experimenters or other familiar people.
“Our findings suggest that how much humans care about witnesses and audience members may not be quite so specific to our species,” says co-author Shinya Yamamoto of Kyoto University.
Previous research has shown that the perceived presence of a potential witness can affect human cognitive performance and decision-making, which the authors of the study write… “could be explained by the importance of reputation management to our species”.
The researchers note that it remains unclear what specific mechanisms underlie these audience-related effects and suggest that further study in apes may offer more insight into how this trait evolved and why it developed.
“These characteristics are a core part of how our societies are largely based on reputation, and if chimpanzees also pay special attention towards audience members while they perform their tasks, it stands to reason that these audience-based characteristics could have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage,” says Tamamoto.
