Map Reading by Chimpanzees

Abstract

Infant chimpanzees, after watching a small black-and-white closed-circuit television picture of a familiar caretaker walking out into an outdoor field and disappearing from sight, were more successful in finding the person than if they had been given no such cue; and their performance approximated that which obtained after they had seen the same scene normally, via direct perception.

Videotapes as enrichment for captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

“…Such studies could include presenting social groups of chimpanzees with videotapes and measuring intragroup responses during and after viewing the videotapes; giving chimpanzees the opportunity to choose among videotapes with different types of content to measure their preferences and to increase their environmental control; and testing the possibility of eliciting more normal social behavior from chimpanzees with abnormal social histories. Finally, the ability to set up problems for chimpanzees to solve using information supplied by visual stimuli, such as studied by Menzel et al [1978], should be more fully investigated. In this, we agree with Washburn and Rumbaugh [1991] and Andrews and Rosenblum [1994] that visual stimuli such as videotapes should be more fully exploited to determine whether the cognitive challenge they can provide might be enriching to captive chimpanzees.…”

“…So did a gorilla when investigators showed videotapes of sexual behavior of other gorillas; however, after the novelty subsided, this did not seem to be a source of great stimulation for the gorilla [Maple and Hoff, 1982]. Menzel et al [1978] concluded that chimpanzees have the ability to apply information they see on television monitors to solving problems in their environment.…”

How young children and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) perceive objects in a 2D display: putting an assumption to the test

“…Chimpanzees show excellent spatial memory in large‐scale outdoor environments. In studies of map reading and memory, four juvenile chimpanzees (Menzel, Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and an adult chimpanzee (Menzel, 2001, 2005) used a video representation of a field or a forest as a guide to locating objects in that area. The adult chimpanzee performed accurately with overnight delays exceeding 15 hours.…”

The Medium Can Obscure the Message: Young Children's Understanding of Video

“…Thus, one might expect that watching an event on video would be almost like watching it directly, so that even 2-year-olds would succeed at the video task. In support of the possibility that a video event might essentially be transparent to young children, several researchers have reported that primates are able to retrieve objects after seeing them hidden on video (Menzel, Premack, & Woodruff, 1978;Vauclair, 1996). Experiment 1 describes 2-year-old children's retrieval of an object they had seen being hidden on video, Experiment 2 reports performance of the same age group for a directly observed hiding event, and Experiment 3 tests an interpretation of their performance in the first two studies.…”