Great apes follow events like humans
Published: Wednesday, Nov 27th 2024, 15:40
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Humans and apes follow the events of a scene in the same way. The movements of their gaze show that they switch their attention back and forth between several elements of a scene.
This was confirmed by a study by the Universities of Neuchâtel (Unine) and Zurich, which was published in the journal "PLOS Biology".
When humans see a cat chasing a mouse, their gaze flicks back and forth between the cat and the mouse and uses the information to link the two in a so-called agent-patient relationship, where the cat is the agent and the mouse is the patient.
This cognitive mechanism is considered one of the foundations for the development of human language, as it determines both the way humans imagine events and the structure of their language. To find out whether apes are able to recognize agent-patient relationships, the researchers showed 84 short video clips to 14 humans and examined their visual reactions using eye-tracking.
The scientists compared the human responses with the visual responses of five chimpanzees, two gorillas and two orangutans from Basel Zoo. They also carried out the test with 29 six-month-old infants, as Unine announced in a press release on Wednesday.
Not only typical for humans
Like adult humans, the monkeys focused their attention predominantly on the agents and the patients. They often alternated their attention between the two, focusing more on the agent when it was handling food.
In addition, the humans tended to focus entirely on the agents and patients, while the apes paid more attention to the background. However, while apes tend to follow events like adult humans, this is not the case with six-month-old human babies, as they are primarily interested in the background.
These results suggest that the way the brain organizes events predates language in evolution. They also show that the way humans organize events into agents and patients is not unique to humans. Rather, it reflects a cognitive ability shared by all primates.
©Keystone/SDA
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