Chimps are better at simple computer games than humans.
In the "hide-and-seek-like" game two humans or chimpanzees are sat back-to-back at computer screens, a Caltech news release reported. Each of the players pushes a circle on the screen and then chooses a box on either side of the monitor. The players are then shown what their opponent chose.
The "hider's" goal is to choose the opposite as their opponent while the "finders" attempts to choose the same box.
This situation is common in everyday life. People attempt to read other's behavior patterns, especially when trying to get away with something. Alternatively people often strive to make their behavior unpredictable in order to catch someone doing something they shouldn't be.
"The nice thing about the game theory used in this study is that it allows you to boil down all of these situations to their strategic essence," Caltech graduate student and coauthor Rahul Bhui said in the news release.
If both players are playing strategically there is a limit to the amount of times one can win; this limit can be described with something called the Nash equilibrium.
The researchers compared the game play of six chimpanzees with that of 16 Japanese students. The chimps proved to be much better at predicting their opponent's behavior. The quality of reward for winning was adjusted several times, which proved to change the Nash equilibrium.
The chimpanzees played in mother-child pairs and had been trained more extensively on the equipment, which may have contributed to their better performances, but the researchers think it is unlikely.
The team believes the chimps' impressive performance could be related to their excellent short-term memory.
The researchers came up with two primary explanations for the phenomenon: "The first has to do with the roles of competition and cooperation in chimpanzee versus human societies; the second with the differential evolution of human and chimpanzee brains since our evolutionary paths split between [four] and [five] million years ago," the news release reported.
Chimpanzees are generally less cooperative with each other than humans are and have a society ruled by dominance.
"While young chimpanzees hone their competitive skills with constant practice, playing hide-and-seek and wrestling, " study leader Colin Camerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics, said in the news release. "Their human counterparts shift at a young age from competition to cooperation using our special skill at language."
Language may have also been a factor. The humans playing the game were not allowed to talk to each other, while chimpanzees already communicate primarily in body language.
WATCH:
