Chimpanzee task performance improves with human audience, study finds

Chimpanzees showed better performance on difficult computer tasks when observed by humans, reveals a study published in iScience on November 8. Conducted at Kyoto University, the research observed chimpanzees performing number-based tasks on touch screens, monitored in different audience conditions. Their performance was found to increase with task difficulty when the number of human observers also increased. However, for simpler tasks, chimpanzees performed worse in the presence of a larger audience, highlighting a nuanced relationship between observation and performance.

A unique framework for chimpanzee-human interaction

Researchers, including Christen Lin of Kyoto University, investigated whether chimpanzees experienced an “audience effect,” typically attributed to reputation management in humans. THE studyled by Shinya Yamamoto and Akiho Muramatsu, focused on chimpanzees accustomed to daily interactions with humans and familiar with touch-screen tasks for food rewards. Given the animals’ comfortable coexistence with humans, the researchers saw an opportunity to examine whether audience dynamics could influence their task performance, as they do in humans.

Complex effects of human observation

During thousands of sessions spanning six years, the chimpanzees’ performance was measured against various difficulties. The study found a clear improvement in complex tasks when observed by a larger human audience, while simpler tasks saw a decrease in accuracy under similar conditions. The researchers found this surprising, because it indicates a level of social awareness previously thought to be more exclusive to humans.

Implications for understanding social dynamics in primates

The results suggest that the impact of being observed, even by another species, may not be unique to humans. As noted by Yamamoto, the influence of an audience on the performance of nonhuman primates provides valuable insights into the social behaviors that may have shaped early primate societies, long before the emergence of reputation-based systems human. Further studies could help understand the evolutionary basis of this social trait in great apes.