Washington, April 24 (ANI): A Georgia State University researcher has hinted that a chimpanzee is unable to use its own initiative to gain the best possible reward if it behaves differently from a dominant group member.
Lydia Hopper trained a dominant female chimp to exchange one of two types of token for a chunk of carrot.
This female was then housed with five subordinate chimps, and they quickly learned to ape her reward-receiving style.
But later the rules of the game were changed. Mow, alongside the carrot-giving first token, the second token was worth a better prize of grapes.
But despite four of the chimps exchanging the second token type for grapes while they were learning to get rewards, they all reverted to only exchanging the first token type for carrots- the method the dominant chimp used throughout the experiment
Hopper, however, remains unconvinced that this behaviour means chimps are less clever than we thought.
"Copying what a dominant group member does could help the chimps to maintain alliances," Hopper said, much like the way humans follow fashion trends.
The study has been published in Animal Behaviour. (ANI)
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