Monkeys OUTSMART humans in problem solving exercise to win food in test of cognitive flexibility
- Researchers gave humans and monkeys a touchscreen puzzle to unlock a prize
- Humans were much more likely than monkeys to keep trying old solutions
- 70 percent of monkeys recognized a new shortcut to unlock a prize
New research shows that monkeys outperform humans in a test meant to measure cognitive flexibility.
The experiment, conducted by a team of psychology researchers at George State University, pitted humans against capuchin and rhesus macaque monkeys.
Both groups were asked to interact with a touchscreen computer that featured four squares with different patterns in them.
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Researchers at Georgia State University pitted capuchin monkeys (pictured above) and rhesus macaques against humans in a set of touchscreen puzzles
When subjects pressed on the squares in the right sequence, a triangle would appear in place of one of the squares, and when pressed the triangle would produce a reward.
For the monkeys, the reward was a banana pellet, and for humans it was either a short audio jingle or a sign of points being tallied up.
To test how flexible the parties could be in their cognitive process, the researchers began including the triangle on the touchscreen from the beginning.
According to a report in LiveScience, they found that the monkeys were much more likely to key in on the fact they could get the reward just by touching the triangle.
Test subjects would unlock a prize for pressing a series of squares in the right sequence
The human subjects, however, insisted on first pressing the squares in the original sequence before pressing the triangle.
In all, 70 percent of the monkeys figured out they could just press the triangle and skip pressing the squares.
A majority of 61 percent of the human test subjects insisted on going through the rote square sequence before pressing the triangle for the reward.
‘I think we’re less and less surprised when primates outsmart humans sometimes,’ Julia Watzek, a graduate researcher at Georgia State University, said in a statement.
According to Watzek, there may be both social and evolutionary reasons for the preference for the rote approach to problem solving.
‘It is interesting to think through ways in which we train our children to think a specific way and stay in the box and not outside of it,’ Watzek said.
‘There are good reasons for why we do what we do, but I think sometimes it can get us into a lot of trouble.’
According to Julia Watzek, one of the researchers of Georgia State University, humans were more likely than monkeys to ignore a new shortcut to the prize and continue pressing squares in the old sequence
Many different primate species have shown the capacity for advanced and dynamic intelligence.
Earlier this year, researchers documented how baboons, macaques, and other ‘Old World’ monkeys were able to combine different call sounds in ways that could convey more specific meanings, something that resembled a unique form of speech.
In Sierra Leonne, researchers also discovered that as chimpanzees were being forced out of protected areas they had acclimatized to human developments in a number of ways – including how to cross roads safely and the best times to visit human habitats.
