Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 2-year-old children (Homo sapiens) understand double invisible displacement?

• Published in: Journal of comparative psychology (1983) Vol. 120; no. 2; p. 89
• Main Authors: Collier-Baker, Emma, Suddendorf, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.05.2006
• Subjects: Animals; Behavior, Animal; Child, Preschool; Cognition; Female; Humans; Male; Pan troglodytes; Space Perception; Visual Perception
• ISSN: 0735-7036
• DOI: 10.1037/0735-7036.120.2.89

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young children (Homo sapiens) have difficulty with double invisible displacements in which an object is hidden in two nonadjacent boxes in a linear array. Experiment 1 eliminated the possibility that chimpanzees' previous poor performance was due to the hiding direction of the displacement device. As in Call (2001), subjects failed double nonadjacent displacements, showing a tendency to select adjacent boxes. In Experiments 2 and 3, chimpanzees and 24-month-old children were tested on a new adaptation of the task in which four hiding boxes were presented in a diamond-shaped array on a vertical plane. Both species performed above chance on double invisible displacements using this format, suggesting that previous poor performance was due to a response bias or inhibition problem rather than a fundamental limitation in representational capacity.