In general, apes that were good in one area-such as tests requiring creative tool use-were not necessarily good in another-such as copying the actions of a test-giver to get a reward, the team reports this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. ![]() The researchers analyzed the data to determine if the scores in some tests helped predict performance in others. In another, they had to use a stick to get food placed on a high platform. In one experiment, chimps were asked to find food in a container after it had been shuffled around with empty containers. So they gave a battery of physical and social tests to 106 chimps at Ngamba Island and the Tchimpounga chimpanzee sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo, and to 23 captive chimpanzees and bonobos in Germany. During the study, they noticed a wide range of skills among the chimps and wondered whether they could measure this variation in ability-and whether there were studies that could predict the chimps’ overall performance in all areas, like an IQ test in humans. Herrmann and her colleagues had previously tested chimps in a study designed to compare the skills of the animals with those of human children. ![]() ![]() "Natasha was really much better than other chimps," says biologist and first author of the new study Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
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