Lin Christen, Muramatsu Akiho, Yamamoto Shinya
Wildlife Research Center, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8203, Japan.
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto 484-8506, Japan.
iScience. 2024 Nov 8;27(11):111191. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.111191. eCollection 2024 Nov 15.
Human cognitive performance can be significantly influenced by the presence of audience members. While often associated with reputation management, which is considered uniquely human, it is unclear to what degree this phenomenon is shared with non-human animals. To investigate such audience effects in chimpanzees, we recorded the performance of six chimpanzees on three different numerical touch screen tasks varying in difficulty and cognitive demand, in the presence of variable audience member compositions over six years. Our results indicated that chimpanzee performance was influenced by the number and types of audience present. Performance increased for the most difficult task as the experimenter count increased, while for the easiest task, performance decreased as familiar audience and experimenter count increased. This suggests that audience effects on cognitive processing can be found in chimpanzees and that the evolutionary roots of this trait may date back to before the development of reputation-based normative societies in humans.
人类的认知表现会受到观众在场的显著影响。虽然这通常与声誉管理相关联，而声誉管理被认为是人类独有的，但目前尚不清楚这种现象在多大程度上与非人类动物相同。为了研究黑猩猩中的这种观众效应，我们在六年时间里，记录了六只黑猩猩在三种不同难度和认知需求的数字触摸屏任务上的表现，同时设置了不同的观众组成。我们的结果表明，黑猩猩的表现受到在场观众数量和类型的影响。随着实验人员数量的增加，最难任务的表现有所提高，而对于最简单的任务，随着熟悉的观众和实验人员数量的增加，表现则下降。这表明在黑猩猩中也能发现观众对认知加工的影响，并且这种特征的进化根源可能可以追溯到人类基于声誉的规范社会发展之前。
