YOU probably aren鈥檛 much smarter than a chimp when it comes to cooperative games 鈥� you just know the rules.
Games are often used to test primates鈥� ability to reason about cooperation. In one game two players independently choose one of two tokens: one that always yields a small reward, or one that gives a big reward only if both players choose it.
Humans quickly settle into the second strategy to maximise the reward, but other primates prove less able. Is this down to better reasoning, or merely because humans have had the rules explained to them?
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, at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and colleagues replayed the game with humans, chimps and capuchin monkeys, but made all participants learn the rules by trial and error.
Humans still performed the best, but not nearly as well as in previous tests. They also fared only slightly better than the other species, with just five of the 26 human pairs adopting the maximum-reward strategy ().
This suggests that language, not reasoning ability, accounts for most of the apparent human superiority at this game.