Object-based attention in chimpanzees(Summary of Awarded Presentation at the 25th Annual Meeting)

抄録

We investigated object-based attention in chimpanzees with an attention shift task. The chimpanzees were rewarded by touching a target (a red disk) which appeared after a brief presentation of a cue (a yeHow square). We hypothesized that if object-based attention does work, the reaction time (RT) would be shorter when the target appeared in the cued rectangle than in the other rectangle. We could not observe any evidence of such a within-object benefit in Experiment 1, in which two rectangles were arranged in parallel. In Experiment 2, the rectangles were arranged horizontally in a line, to reduce variation in the distance from the start key to each target location. The RT pattern of the chimpanzees in Experiment 2 suggested an object-based attention in them.