title: Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 2-year-old children (Homo sapiens) understand double invisible displacement?
abstract: Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and young children (Homo sapiens) have difficulty with double invisible displacements in which an object is hidden in two nonadjacent boxes in a linear array. Experiment 1 eliminated the possibility that chimpanzees' previous poor performance was due to the hiding direction of the displacement device. As in Call (2001), subjects failed double nonadjacent displacements, showing a tendency to select adjacent boxes. In Experiments 2 and 3, chimpanzees and 24-month-old children were tested on a new adaptation of the task in which four hiding boxes were presented in a diamond-shaped array on a vertical plane. Both species performed above chance on double invisible displacements using this format, suggesting that previous poor performance was due to a response bias or inhibition problem rather than a fundamental limitation in representational capacity.
authors.affiliation: Early Cognitive Development Unit, School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. e.collier-baker@psy.uq.edu.au
authors.forename: Emma
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Collier-Baker
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Suddendorf
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D002679:Pan troglodytes; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception