Chimpanzees are locker room players, who knew?
Researchers from the United Kingdom and the United States recently discovered that chimpanzees can master the search for hidden fruits in a special virtual reality video game.
Studies show that chimpanzees use the landscape orientation feature to improve orientation when searching for virtual fruits in 3D games.
Six zoo-dwelling chimpanzees used touchscreen technology to learn the way to a distant virtual tree with a variety of fruits underneath.
They even figured out how to find Landmark from different backgrounds.
A primate from the Leipzig Zoo in Germany “participated in the first empirical study of how chimpanzees behave in the field in a naturalistic virtual environment, and how chimpanzees maneuver in the virtual world is real. We have shown that we share some important characteristics with the navigation of the’.
“This result also suggests that virtual environmental techniques can be used to solve long-term problems in the study of spatial cognition and other forms of cognition in primates,” added researchers from the University of St. Andrews.
Dr. Matthias Arlitz, Postdoctoral Fellow at St Andrews, explains:
“Because of the spatial limitations of the zoo, it is clearly difficult to experimentally study spatial cognition in nonhuman primates.
Virtual environments allow researchers to create large-scale controlled environments for primates to navigate, including entirely new environments.
He added: “Beyond the obvious goals of chimpanzee space training, what struck us was the astonishing speed at which chimpanzees learned to control virtual agents and perform space tasks.
“It required less training than I originally thought, and certainly less work than many traditional touch screens designed for animals.”
The participants included three adult male and three adult female chimpanzees from the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Institute (WKPRC) at the Leipzig Zoo.
The group of researchers said: “All six chimpanzees had experience using touch screens and five had limited experience with 3D video games at the start of the study.
“All participation is voluntary, all testing takes place in the familiar WKPRC monkey area, and access to touch screen tasks is granted on a regular basis.
A new custom virtual reality (VR) application, APExplorer 3D, has been developed for research and introduced primates into virtual environments. This allows you to control invisible characters in the first person and explore and manipulate objects in three dimensions. cartoon style
The game’s difficulty increased over the course of a month, becoming a “gradually difficult navigation task” and the virtual world “having some cognitive processes and behavioral signatures in a virtual environment that is supposed to navigate in nature”. Focused on “show”. Learn how to identify and search for different waypoints, optimize route efficiency, and more.
And Dr. Arlitz added: .. Evolution of the navigation characteristics of our species.
The team plans to make the version of the APExplorer3D application available in the OpenScience Framework so that other researchers can replicate their methods and adapt to their research questions.
Source: Metro
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