Domain-specific inferences about conspecifics’ skills by chimpanzees

Abstract

Chimpanzees collaborate with conspecifics in their daily life. However, the cognitive processes underlying partner recruitment aren’t fully understood. In the current study, chimpanzees needed to recruit a conspecific partner for either a cooperative or competitive experimental task. They spontaneously preferred to recruit cooperation partners who they have seen performing successfully before on a similar task, over partners who had failed. In contrast, the chimpanzees needed to experience the consequences of competing against co-action partners before settling on a preference for the unsuccessful partner. This divergent pattern may be due to increased cognitive demands of competitive compared to cooperative tasks. Despite the observed differences of social information use in our cooperative and competitive experimental tasks, the findings are exciting as they extend our knowledge of chimpanzee’s social evaluation abilities by showing that they can draw domain-specific inferences about conspecifics’ skills.