Having trouble passing up dessert, or the cute shoes that aren't in your budget? You might want to imitate apes. As some amusing, yet revealing lab video shows, chimpanzees can figure out ways to employ willpower... if it pays off later on. This ScienCentral News video explains.
"Animal Impulses?"
Researchers at Georgia State University's Language Research Center already knew their chimpanzees are pretty smart. They have good memories, can use symbolic language to communicate, and even do simple arithmetic. But it turns out that the apes can also plan for the future and devise ways to control their impulses.
Michael Beran and Ted Evans were interested in how people exert impulse control. "How we deal with situations in which we might be tempted by certain kinds of things but we need to avoid those things if we can in order to benefit in the long run," explains Beran. "So, situations that are similar to people on a diet or who are trying to stop smoking."
"One thing we tend to say as humans is that when we fail in these things, we say, 'Oh, we're just giving in to our animal impulses.' And so the question is, are animals always impulsive, or can they show self-control? Can they delay their own gratification?"
They can, even better than young human children, the researchers say. They gave the chimps candies one at a time, and the longer the animals waited to eat them, the more candies they earned.
"We taught the chimpanzees that the longer that they waited to eat the candies, the more candies they would get," Evans explains. The researchers found that when these apes had playthings like toothbrushes or magazines handy, they used them as distractions to help them delay eating the treats so they could get more.
"While they were waiting, if we gave them toys, the longer they played with the toys, the longer they waited [and] the more candies they would get," says Evans. "But if we moved the candies, if they were delivered out of reach of the animals, they showed less interest in the toys. So this showed us that they are using these toys to cope with the situation."
As the scientists wrote in Biology Letters, the chimps figured out this strategy on their own.
"The toys themselves didn't really distract the chimpanzees from the task," Evans says. "It was the chimps' decision to play with the toys when it was most appropriate to help them delay gratification."
"This is the first time I think that anyone has shown that a non-human animal shows self-distraction in its own behavior– that a nonhuman animal finds a way to distract itself at exactly the point where distraction allows it to obtain a better future outcome," says Beran.
Using the toys, the chimps could delay their gratification as long as 20 minutes, and Beran says that may be an underestimate because the researchers haven't yet looked at whether they could wait even longer.
"Chimpanzees are at least as able to inhibit their responses as are most young children, and for long periods of time, which contradicts the dichotomy that we humans have set up of animals as impulsive creatures and humans as rational ones," he adds.
"These abilities are probably related to the kinds of processes that we're very comfortable calling 'thinking' when we talk about them from a human perspective. And so we probably should be equally comfortable calling these behaviors part of a thought process in a nonhuman animal like a chimpanzee."
The researchers say understanding how apes control their impulses may lead to better ideas for helping children with impulse-control problems.
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