Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and orangutan (Pongo abelii) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use

Abstract

Planning for future needs has traditionally been considered to be restricted to human cognition. Although recent studies on great ape and corvid cognition challenge this belief, the phylogenesis of human planning remains largely unknown. The complex skill for future planning has not yet been satisfactorily established in any other extant primate species than our own. In humans, planning for future needs rely heavily on two overarching capacities, both of which lie at the heart of our cognition: self-control, often deWned as the suppression of immediate drives in favor of delayed rewards, and mental time travel, which could be described as a detached mental experience of a past or future event. Future planning is linked to additional high complexity cognition such as metacognition and a consciousness usually not attributed to animals. In a series of four experiments based on tool use, we demonstrate that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and orangutans (Pongo abelii) override immediate drives in favor of future needs, and they do not merely rely on associative learning or semantic prospection when confronted with a planning task. These results suggest that great apes engage in planning for the future by out competing current drives and mentally pre-experiencing an upcoming event. This suggests that the advanced mental capacities utilized in human future planning are shared by phylogenetically more ancient species than previously believed.

Emotion as an Intervening Variable in Understanding the Cognitive and Social Complexity and Well-Being of Chimpanzees

“…Beran, SavageRumbaugh, Pate, & Rumbaugh (1999) showed that chimpanzees forwent an immediate reward to obtain a better reward by delaying their button-press response. Similarly, Osvath & Osvath (2008) showed that chimpanzees forwent an immediate reward to obtain a tool that would lead to a greater reward in the future. Additionally, Evans & Beran (2007) showed that chimpanzees diverted their attention to toys in the presence of accumulating rewards to obtain more rewards subsequently.…”

On the Acheulean origin of mind and language

“…Also, apes seem to be less interested in relations between things (secondary circular reactions) than human infants (Vauclair & Bard 1983). They also seem to keep record of reciprocity between members of groups (Tomasello and Call 1997) and perhaps possess some foresight (Osvath & Osvath 2008, pace Suddendorf et al 2009), a limited amount of metacognition (Call 2010) and a kind of precursor of our species' episodic memory (MartinOrdas et al 2010).…”

New Considerations on the Proper Study of Man – and, marginally, some other animals

“…A more recent study, really concerned with the ability to plan for future needs in apes, found them to be able to pick up an instrument, within a set of objects, which was visibly very different, but had the same relevant properties, as the tool used on earlier occasions (Cf. Osvath & Osvath 2008). …”