Japanese researchers have found that chimpanzees playing videogames can recognise the characters they control onscreen, an aspect of self-awareness which could help in the study of evolution in humans.
Self-awareness is a fundamental characteristic of the human mind, but much remains unknown about its origins. Scientists at Kyoto University’s primate research institute used a test developed for schizophrenics to see if self-agency – the feeling that one is in control of one’s actions – exists in chimpanzees, human beings’ closest living relatives.
MSNBC reports that three adult female chimps were trained to use a trackball to move a white cursor around a screen, hitting green targets as they did so. Researchers then added a second white cursor to the screen, the movement of which was not player-controlled but based on recordings of how the chimps had moved around the screen during previous sessions.
After hitting a green target, the chimps were tasked with pointing at the cursor they had been controlling, and were rewarded with treats if they managed to do so. 99 per cent of the time they were correct.
When researchers added a measure of latency between trackball input and cursor movement, or made the cursor move at a slightly different angle to the trackball, the chimps became far worse at the game. Researcher Takaaki Kaneko said that, while the experiment showed that self-agency existed in chimps, much was still to be done.
“I personally believed that chimpanzees perceive self-agency in a similar way to which we humans do, and we have experimentally proven that here,” she said. “How exactly we humans and chimps differ is a next step to study. To understand the evolution of the human mind, we need to compare related species.”
This is not the first evidence of primates learning to play videogames: at GDC in March Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani showed footage of an orangutan putting in a sterling performance on the game’s arcade cabinet.
Source: MSNBC
Image Credit: Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University