Intuitive statistical inferences in chimpanzees and humans follow Weber's law

Cognition
Johanna EckertHannes Rakoczy

Abstract

Humans and nonhuman great apes share a sense for intuitive statistical reasoning, making intuitive probability judgments based on proportional information. This ability is of fundamental importance, in particular for inferring general regularities from finite numbers of observations and, vice versa, for predicting the outcome of single events using prior information. To date it remains unclear which cognitive mechanism underlies and enables this capacity. The aim of the present study was to gain deeper insights into the cognitive structure of intuitive statistics by probing its signatures in chimpanzees and humans. We tested 24 sanctuary-living chimpanzees in a previously established paradigm which required them to reason from populations of food items with different ratios of preferred (peanuts) and non-preferred items (carrot pieces) to randomly drawn samples. In a series of eight test conditions, the ratio between the two ratios to be discriminated (ROR) was systematically varied ranging from 1 (same proportions in both populations) to 16 (high magnitude of difference between populations). One hundred and forty-four human adults were tested in a computerized version of the same task. The main result was that both chimpanzee ...Continue Reading

Citations

Mar 5, 2020·Nature Communications·Amalia P M Bastos, Alex H Taylor
Apr 2, 2020·Biology Letters·Stephen R Ross, Jesse G Leinwand
Aug 1, 2020·Frontiers in Psychology·Amalia P M Bastos, Alex H Taylor
Jun 12, 2019·Perspectives on Psychological Science : a Journal of the Association for Psychological Science·Stephanie Denison, Fei Xu
Oct 14, 2020·Royal Society Open Science·Sarah PlacìHannes Rakoczy
Jan 12, 2021·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences·Stefanie KeuppAlicia P Melis
Feb 21, 2021·Child Development·Emily Szkudlarek, Elizabeth M Brannon
Apr 13, 2021·The Behavioral and Brain Sciences·Sam Clarke, Jacob Beck

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