When people are watched by an audience, it can change their performance. Now, researchers who have published a report in the journal Cell Press found that chimpanzees’ performance on computer tasks is influenced by how many people are watching them.
The findings suggest that this “audience effect” predates the development of reputation-based human societies, the researchers say.
“It was very surprising to find that the chimpanzees were affected in their tasks by audience members,” says Christen Lin of Kyoto University in Japan.
“We might not expect a chimpanzee to particularly care if another species watches it perform a task, but the fact that it appears to be affected by human audiences even as a function of task difficulty suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have originally expected.”
Chimpanzees frequently interact with humans
The researchers, including Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, wanted to find out whether the audience effect, often attributed in humans to reputation management, might also exist in nonhuman primates.
People pay attention to who is looking at them, sometimes even unconsciously, in ways that affect their performance. Although chimpanzees live in hierarchical societies, it was not clear to what extent they too might be influenced by those who watch them.
“Our study site is special in that the chimpanzees here frequently interact with humans and even enjoy their company, participating in various touchscreen experiments for food rewards almost daily,” says Muramatsu.
“As such, we saw the opportunity to not only explore potential similarities in audience-related effects, but also to do so in the context of chimpanzees who share unique bonds with humans.”
A more complex relationship than we would have initially expected
The researchers made the discovery after analyzing thousands of sessions in which the chimpanzees performed a task on a touch screen over six years.
They found that across three different number-based tasks, the chimpanzees did better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters supervising them increased.
Conversely, they also found that for the easiest task, the chimpanzees performed worse when they were supervised by multiple experimenters or other familiar people, they write EurekAlert.
The researchers pointed out that it remains unclear what specific mechanisms underlie these audience-related effects, even for humans. They suggest that more in-depth study in monkeys could provide more insight into how this trait evolved and why it developed.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
