Language-naive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) judge relations between relations in a conceptual matching-to-sample task.
- 1 January 1997
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes
- Vol. 23 (1) , 31-43
- https://doi.org/10.1037//0097-7403.23.1.31
Abstract
Three chimpanzees with a history of conditional and numeric token training spontaneously matched relations between relations under conditions of nondifferential reinforcement. Heretofore, this conceptual ability was demonstrated only in language-trained chimpanzees. The performance levels of the language-naive animals in this study, however, were equivalent to those of a 4th animal--Sarah--whose history included language training and analogical problem solving. There was no evidence that associative factors mediated successful performance in any of the animals. Prior claims of a profound disparity between language-trained and language-naive chimpanzees apparently can be attributed to prior experience with arbitrary tokens consistently associated with abstract relations and not language per se.Keywords
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