Thursday, January 5, 2012

Great Apes Make Sophisticated Decisions

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111229091636.htm

Orangutan. (Credit: © bertys30 / Fotolia)

5 comments:

Sergio said...

Wow. Isn't the experiment not very reliable because they placed one banana out in the open and the other one in a cup. But since the specimen couldn't know what was in the other cup, how could he have weighed the possibilities against each other.

Emory said...

I cannot entirely trust this experiment. Like Sergio said, I don't think this is a very reliable experiment. The ape could have just been lazy and didn't want to choose which cup had the banana, instead he/she just wanted to be happy by eating a small banana.

David said...

I’d like to know how they conducted the banana experiment. How many times did the researchers show the apes where the banana was hidden? How hungry were the apes in the first place? Are these apes living in a zoo or in the wild? I need to know more before I trust this study.

Luca said...

I agree with Sergio, Emory, and David, and I don't think this is very reliable. Did the researchers conduct the study with multiple cup options? Maybe the apes would be more eager to choose the cup option when there were only three cups, and maybe they would choose the smaller piece if there were five cups.

Alex G. said...

I agree with everyone who has posted so far. This article/experiment was not very reliable. They did not tell us much about the apes. Maybe the ape was trained or maybe the animal was wild. They should have told us more.