(Press-News.org) ATLANTA--Chimpanzees are capable of some degree of planning for the future, in a manner similar to human children, while some species of monkeys struggle with this task, according to researchers at Georgia State University, Wofford College and Agnes Scott College.
Their findings were published on March 23 in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.
The study assessed the planning abilities of chimpanzees, two monkey species (rhesus macaques and capuchin monkeys) and human children (ages 28 to 66 months old) using a computerized game-like program that presented 100 unique mazes to the participants and required them to move a cursor through a maze to reach a goal at the bottom of the screen.
"The chimpanzees proved to be quite good at the task, although monkeys showed more trouble with the harder mazes that required greater inhibition and more anticipation of future 'trouble spots' in the mazes," said Dr. Michael Beran, associate director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State. "These data highlight the capacity of chimpanzees - and to a more limited degree, monkeys - to anticipate and plan future moves in these game-like tasks, a prerequisite for more complicated types of future-oriented cognition."
The study found variability in the performance within each species and across ages in children, suggesting that a number of other cognitive processes may influence planning. The performance differences could be attributed to differences in focused attention, overall brain size and social systems, the study said.
Children were good at negotiating their way through the maze, although older children performed better than younger children. Chimpanzees were better at the computerized maze task than both species of monkeys. Monkeys had difficulty with the task when they were required to change directions or move away from the ultimate goal in order to eventually reach it, suggesting limited abilities to plan movements through this form of maze.
The mazes varied in difficulty, and participants had to make one, two or three choices within the maze that could potentially have irreversible errors. The easiest mazes could be completed by simply moving the cursor in the direction of the goal, but others required a reversal of direction at one of the choice points or movement away from the goal in order to eventually reach it.
To achieve the best performance, subjects sometimes had to plan ahead to the end of the maze in order to move the cursor in the correct direction, avoid traps and reverse directions, if needed. Human children from a local preschool were included in the study to see how closely the nonhuman primates matched their performance.
INFORMATION:
The research team also included Audrey Parrish and Theodore Evans of Georgia State, Sara Futch of Wofford and Dr. Bonnie Perdue of Agnes Scott.
This study was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.
A workplace intervention designed to reduce work-family conflict gave employed parents more time with their children without reducing their work time.
"These findings may encourage changes in the structure of jobs and culture of work organizations to support families," said Kelly Davis, research assistant professor of human development and family studies.
The research is part of the Work, Family and Health Network's evaluation of the effects of a workplace intervention designed to reduce work-family conflict by increasing both employees' control over their schedule ...
(Boston) - Emergency departments (ED) provide a promising venue to address opioid deaths with education on both overdose prevention and appropriate actions in a witnessed overdose. In addition, ED's have the potential to equip patients with nasal naloxone rescue kits as part of this effort.
These findings are from a study published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, and is the first study to demonstrate the feasibility of ED-based opioid overdose prevention education and naloxone distribution to trained laypersons, patients and their social network.
In ...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Researchers from Brown University and the University of Rhode Island have demonstrated a promising new way to increase the effectiveness of radiation in killing cancer cells.
The approach involves gold nanoparticles tethered to acid-seeking compounds called pHLIPs. The pHLIPs (pH low-insertion peptides) home in on high acidity of malignant cells, delivering their nanoparticle passengers straight to the cells' doorsteps. The nanoparticles then act as tiny antennas, focusing the energy of radiation in the area directly around the cancer ...
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered how vitamin E deficiency may cause neurological damage by interrupting a supply line of specific nutrients and robbing the brain of the "building blocks" it needs to maintain neuronal health.
The findings - in work done with zebrafish - were just published in the Journal of Lipid Research. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
The research showed that zebrafish fed a diet deficient in vitamin E throughout their life had about 30 percent lower levels of DHA-PC, which is a ...
PITTSBURGH, April, 13, 2015 - A serendipitous combination of technology and scientific discovery, coupled with a hunch, allowed University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) researchers to reveal a previously invisible biological process that may be implicated in the rapid growth of some cancers.
The project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is described in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"I was so amazed by what I was seeing," said lead author Masahiro Shuda, Ph.D., research assistant professor in Pitt's ...
HOUSTON - (April 13, 2015) - For decades, scientists and physicians have puzzled over the fact that infants with the postnatal neurodevelopmental disorder Rett syndrome show symptoms of the disorder from one to two years after birth.
In a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Huda Zoghbi and her colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital, unravel the mystery by looking at when and how the causal gene involved (methyl-CpG binding protein 2 or MECP2) binds ...
Fresh insights into how bacteria protect themselves - by forming a waterproof raincoat - could help develop improved products to protect plants from disease.
Researchers have discovered how communities of beneficial bacteria form a waterproof coating on the roots of plants, to protect them from microbes that could potentially cause plant disease.
Their insights could lead to ways to control this shield and improve its efficiency, which could help curb the risk of unwanted infections in agricultural or garden plants, the team says.
Scientists at the Universities of ...
A new analysis of the chemical make-up of meteorites has helped scientists work out when the Earth formed its layers.
The research by an international team of scientists confirmed the Earth's first crust had formed around 4.5 billion years ago.
The team measured the amount of the rare elements hafnium and lutetium in the mineral zircon in a meteorite that originated early in the solar system.
"Meteorites that contain zircons are rare. We had been looking for an old meteorite with large zircons, about 50 microns long, that contained enough hafnium for precise analysis," ...
Diversity of life abounds on Earth, and there's no need to look any farther than the ocean's surface for proof. There are over 200,000 species of phytoplankton alone, and all of those species of microscopic marine plants that form the base of the marine food web need the same basic resources to grow--light and nutrients.
A study by a team of scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), University of Rhode Island (URI), and Columbia University, published April 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how species of diatoms--one ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. - One of the brain's main jobs is information processing - what is critical, however, is that information in the brain gets transferred to the right places at the right times.
Research on large-scale brain networks by the University of Michigan Medical School reveals that "hubs" in the brain - highly connected regions that like hubs of the airport system - tend to consistently attract information flow.
"Understanding how information transfer occurs in the brain is critical, especially if network hubs are taken off line by anesthesia, tumor or stroke," ...
