Chimps able to think like humans
According to a study published in the journal Cognition, our closest ancestors do not only share the big portion of our DNA with us, but they are also capable of metacognitive monitoring, a mechanism that defines the intelligent decision-making process, reported by Scienceblog.
Researchers from several different colleges including Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, Wofford College and the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, recently discovered that chimpanzees are able to think about their own decisions, express confidence about the matter and alter their actions accordingly.
Human beings are the only species that are known to carry such ability but the new finding might challenge that conception. Humans have the cognitive capacity to think about their own actions and thinking. They can report their confidence about a matter; such as how well or little they know of something. In addition to being aware of their own cognition, and having the ability to assess how confident they are, humans can also express it in many different ways; they can express it vocally by talking, with body language and they can even express it with numbers, statistics and percentage.
One of the researchers from the study told the scienceblog that their team tried to create a lab environment that allows chimpanzees to act as close to their natural behaviour as possible. Then the team put chimpanzees to several memory and cognitive tasks in order to observe their cognitive processing and also their confidence. She said, " The team's approach was to thing what chimpanzees might naturally do in the wild that requires them to reflect on their knowledge and then act confidently or perhaps hesitate before moving," scienceblog reported.
Researchers observed chimpanzees during several computerized experiments and noted that chimpanzees were quite capable of monitoring strength of their own memories and could take action according to their confidence level about the given task.
