Thursday, 1 August 2019

Great apes found to bond when watching videos together


JULY 18, 2019 REPORT
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org
A pair of researchers affiliated with Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has found that great apes tend to bond with one another when they watch a video together. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Wouter Wolf and Michael Tomasello describe their work involving studying chimpanzees and bonobos as they watched videos together and how they behaved afterward.
Most people have experienced the feeling of bonding with another person, or even several people, when watching a movie or TV show together. Until now, behavioral scientists have believed such feelings were restricted to humans. In this new effort, Wolf and Tomasello have shown that great apes have similar experiences.
The experiments involved seating pairs of chimps together in front of a television so that they could watch a video, and the researchers took measurements of bonding-type behaviour after the video was over. They then compared the behaviour they observed with a control group. They report that chimps that watched the videos together engaged in more bonding-type behaviours.

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