[monkeywire] Study: Chimps Recognize Aping
Carrie McLaren
carrie at stayfreemagazine.org
Wed Sep 8 13:40:42 EDT 2004
September 08, 2004 EDT
Study: Chimps Recognize Aping
By Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20040906/chimp.html
Sept. 8, 2004 - Next time you start imitating chimpanzees at the zoo,
be aware that they know what you're doing.
Australian researcher Mark Nielsen and colleagues at the University
of Queensland report they have the first evidence that animals other
than humans can recognize when they're being imitated.
The research is published online ahead of print publication in the
journal Animal Cognition.
The researchers set up a series of videotaped experiments where one
researcher, Emma Collier-Baker, imitated a friendly 31-year old male
chimp called Cassie.
The researchers looked for behavior normally seen in human children
when they know someone is imitating them.
This includes repeating the imitator's movements and running
sequences of actions, as if testing whether the imitator is indeed
following.
The team found that Cassie repeated movements and performed "testing"
sequences of actions. These included poking his finger out of the
cage, nodding his head, raising his arm, hitting the ground and
wiping his nose.
But the researchers had to make sure that Cassie wasn't doing the
actions for some other reason. So they set up a number of control
experiments.
In the first experiment, Collier-Baker moved at the same time as
Cassie but didn't do the same actions as him; in the second,
Collier-Baker moved randomly, regardless of when Cassie moved; and in
the last one, she did not move at all.
It was only when Collier-Baker actually imitated Cassie, performing
the same actions at the same time, that the chimp performed the
repetitions and testing sequences.
"It just adds more evidence showing that there are more commonalities
between us and our closest living relatives than there are
differences," Nielsen said. "We share a lot of behaviors with them."
Ian Johnston, who researches animal learning at the University of
Sydney, was impressed.
"I think it's a really cool study. It's really well controlled."
Johnston said previous studies had shown that chimps can acquire
language skills, check themselves out in mirrors, learn from each
other, and from humans.
"But this is the first time I'm aware of that they've actually
recognized that a human is imitating them," he said.
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