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Chimpanzees consider humans' psychological states when drawing statistical inferences

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Call_2018_CB_psychologicalstates_AAM.pdf (770.1Kb)
Date
18/06/2018
Author
Eckert, Johanna
Rakoczy, Hannes
Call, Josep
Herrmann, Esther
Hanus, Daniel
Keywords
Intuitive statistics
Probabilistic reasoning
Mental states
Random sampling
Nonhuman primates
Great apes
Social cognition
Pan troglodytes
Sanctuary living
Behavior
BF Psychology
QH301 Biology
QL Zoology
NDAS
BDC
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Abstract
Great apes have been shown to be intuitive statisticians: they can use proportional information within a population to make intuitive probability judgments about randomly drawn samples [1, J.E., J.C., J.H., E.H., and H.R., unpublished data]. Humans, from early infancy onward, functionally integrate intuitive statistics with other cognitive domains to judge the randomness of an event [2; 3; 4; 5 ; 6]. To date, nothing is known about such cross-domain integration in any nonhuman animal, leaving uncertainty about the origins of human statistical abilities. We investigated whether chimpanzees take into account information about psychological states of experimenters (their biases and visual access) when drawing statistical inferences. We tested 21 sanctuary-living chimpanzees in a previously established paradigm that required subjects to infer which of two mixed populations of preferred and non-preferred food items was more likely to lead to a desired outcome for the subject. In a series of three experiments, we found that chimpanzees chose based on proportional information alone when they had no information about experimenters’ preferences and (to a lesser extent) when experimenters had biases for certain food types but drew blindly. By contrast, when biased experimenters had visual access, subjects ignored statistical information and instead chose based on experimenters’ biases. Lastly, chimpanzees intuitively used a violation of statistical likelihoods as indication for biased sampling. Our results suggest that chimpanzees have a random sampling assumption that can be overridden under the appropriate circumstances and that they are able to use mental state information to judge whether this is necessary. This provides further evidence for a shared statistical inference mechanism in apes and humans.
Citation
Eckert , J , Rakoczy , H , Call , J , Herrmann , E & Hanus , D 2018 , ' Chimpanzees consider humans' psychological states when drawing statistical inferences ' , Current Biology , vol. 28 , no. 12 , e3 , pp. 1959-1963 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.077
Publication
Current Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.077
ISSN
0960-9822
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.04.077
Description
This work was supported by a research grant of the German Science Foundation DFG (grant # RA 2155/3-1) to Hannes Rakoczy and Josep Call. Further, we acknowledge support by the Leibniz Association through funding for the Leibniz Science Campus Primate Cognition.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218305499#app2
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17783

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