Behavioural development in a matching-to-sample task and token use by an infant chimpanzee reared by his mother


Autoria(s): Sousa, Cláudia; Okamoto, Sanae; Matsuzawa, Tetsuro
Data(s)

07/02/2010

07/02/2010

2003

Resumo

Animal Cognition, V.6, pp. 259–267

We investigated the behavioural and cognitive development of a captive male infant chimpanzee, Ayumu, raised by his mother, Ai. Here we report Ayumu’s achievements up to the age of 2 years and 3 months, in the context of complex computer-controlled tasks. From soon after birth, Ayumu had been present during an experiment performed by his mother. The task consisted of two phases, a matching-to-sample task in which she received token rewards, and the insertion of these tokens into a vending machine to obtain food rewards. Ayumu himself received no reward or encouragement from humans for any of the actions he exhibited during the experiment. At the age of 9 months and 3 weeks, Ayumu performed his first matching- to-sample trial. At around 1 year and 3 months, he began to perform them consistently. Also during this period, he frequently stole food rewards from his mother. At 2 years and 3 months, Ayumu succeeded for the first time in inserting a token into the vending machine. Once he had succeeded in using a token, he performed both phases of the task in sequence 20 times consecutively. The infant’s behaviour was not shaped by food rewards but by a strong motivation to copy his mother’s behaviour. Our observations of Ayumu thus mirror the learning processes shown by wild chimpanzees.

Identificador

1435-9448

http://hdl.handle.net/10362/2610

Idioma(s)

eng

Publicador

Springer

Relação

;V.6

Direitos

closedAccess

Palavras-Chave #Behavioural development #Matching to sample #Infant chimpanzees #Token use
Tipo

article