Zoology|It would be fascinating to study the effects of the audience if chimpanzees followed the performance, not people, the researcher thinks.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
Chimpanzees do better than usual in difficult tasks if there is more than usual in the audience, not less.
A team from Kyoto University investigated the skills of six chimpanzees.
The chimpanzees’ ability to remember numbers was tested thousands of times over the course of six years.
The size of the audience varied from one to eight people.
Man has put his close relatives, the chimpanzees, through many experiments that test their reasoning and skills to solve intellectual tasks.
One memory-demanding test produced a surprising result in Japan.
The chimpanzees seemed to do better in the difficult parts of the experiment the more outsiders watched the experiment.
Me people, we know very well that the public can put pressure on performances.
Many people feel that a large audience makes performance difficult. Even if the singing voice can tremble or break up in front of a large audience.
Of course, there are also those who are allowed to talk in front of a large audience. This seems to be the case with chimpanzees.
In the past, animal research has hardly measured how the size of the audience could affect the animal’s performance in experiments.
Even though chimpanzees live in hierarchical communities, it was not clear to what extent the public, i.e. the viewers, can influence them, says the release about the research setting on the website Phys.org.
Zoologist Christen Lin from Kyoto University in Japan studied the skills of six chimpanzees with his team.
They performed various experiments on the chimpanzees at the primate research institute. There were three computational tasks in one task package. Their degree of difficulty clearly varied.
In the beginning, the numbers 1-5 appeared on the screen in random places. All the chimpanzees had to do was touch the numbers in the correct order. They got food as a reward.
In the second task, the numbers were not consecutive. For example, the numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 15 could appear anywhere on the screen.
The chimpanzees again had to find the numbers in order. They had to print numbers from smallest to largest.
In the most difficult in the test, the numbers of the reading series were hidden. When the chimpanzee pressed the first number of a series of numbers, the remaining numbers went dark on the screens.
So the chimpanzees had to memorize the place where the next number and the following numbers were.
Chimpanzees were tested in these experiments thousands of times over the course of six years. The audience, mostly researchers, was there in varying degrees.
Usually, one to eight people followed the experiments. Some of them were familiar to the chimpanzees, some were new.
When the task was easy, the chimpanzees performed worse when there were more spectators.
But in the difficult sections, all six chimps did better as the audience size increased. The difference was not very big, but significant.
People may cause positive stress to people, says a member of the team of researchers Shinya Yamamotoalso from Kyoto University.
Researchers say that people live in reputation-based societies where the public is naturally influential.
The same effect may have once developed in monkey clans, says Yamamoto.
Primate researcher and psychologist Miguel Llorente from the University of Girona in Spain suggests According to New Scientistthat further research could find out how the chimpanzees’ personality affects the matter.
According to Lioronte, it would be fascinating to study audience effects with an audience where the performance would be watched by chimpanzees, not humans.
Then the results could be generalized directly to the natural behavior of chimpanzees, he says.
He told about experiments with chimpanzees science magazine Iscience.