Date: February 14, 2019
Source: University of Vienna
Flexible
tool use is closely associated to higher mental processes such as the ability
to plan actions. Now a group of cognitive biologists and comparative
psychologists from the University of Vienna, the University of St Andrews and
the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna that included Isabelle Laumer and
Josep Call, has studied tool related decision-making in a non-human primate
species -- the orangutan. They found that the apes carefully weighed their
options: eat an immediately available food reward or wait and use a tool to
obtain a better reward instead? To do so the apes considered the details such
as differences in quality between the two food rewards and the functionality of
the available tools in order to obtain a high quality food reward, even when
multidimensional task components had to be assessed simultaneously.
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