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Great apes’ strategies to map spatial relations

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Abstract

We investigated reasoning about spatial relational similarity in three great ape species: chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans. Apes were presented with three spatial mapping tasks in which they were required to find a reward in an array of three cups, after observing a reward being hidden in a different array of three cups. To obtain a food reward, apes needed to choose the cup that was in the same relative position (i.e., on the left) as the baited cup in the other array. The three tasks differed in the constellation of the two arrays. In Experiment 1, the arrays were placed next to each other, forming a line. In Experiment 2, the positioning of the two arrays varied each trial, being placed either one behind the other in two rows, or next to each other, forming a line. Finally, in Experiment 3, the two arrays were always positioned one behind the other in two rows, but misaligned. Results suggested that apes compared the two arrays and recognized that they were similar in some way. However, we believe that instead of mapping the left–left, middle–middle, and right–right cups from each array, they mapped the cups that shared the most similar relations to nearby landmarks (table’s visual boundaries).

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) through a grant to the first author. We thank James Close for providing helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript as well as for improving the English of the manuscript. The reported experiments comply with all laws of the country in which they were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    Alenka Hribar, Daniel Haun & Josep Call

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Alenka Hribar

  3. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, 6525 XD, The Netherlands

    Daniel Haun

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, King Henry 1st Street, Portsmouth, PO1 2DY, UK

    Daniel Haun

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  1. Alenka Hribar
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Correspondence to Alenka Hribar.

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Hribar, A., Haun, D. & Call, J. Great apes’ strategies to map spatial relations. Anim Cogn 14, 511–523 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-011-0385-6

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