In certain competitive settings, chimpanzees are smarter than human in situations where they need to figure out how to outwit an opponent, researchers say.
The study by U.S. and Japanese researchers suggests our complex human reasoning skills don't necessarily make for the best performance in some simple tasks.
In a simple kind of "hide and seek" game played on computer screens, chimpanzees were better at learning a competing chimp's strategy to improve their chances of winning than humans pitted against human opponents were, scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University reported.
In a game known as the Inspection Game, players try to anticipate which of two icons on a computer display their opponent will push. "Seekers" try to push the same icon as their opponent, while "hiders" try to push the opposite one.
Sixteen Japanese students playing against each other were slow to figure out their opponents' strategies over many rounds of the game, while the six chimps in the study were quick to learn the game and to figure out their opponents' strategies.
The chimpanzees were also quicker to arrive at a point called the Nash equilibrium, named for mathematician and games theorist John Nash, which posits that two opponents will eventually reach a point of knowing each other's tactics so that the outcome is always a stalemate, like repeating draws in tic-tac-toe. The chimps really accurate guesses shift as the payoff changes, just as equilibrium theory predicts.
That the chimpanzees were quicker to master a winning strategy in a simple test of competition may be because competition for food, mates and resources is a central part of their daily lives, says study co-author Rahul Bhui, a researcher at Caltech.
"Fights with other chimps and dominance hierarchies are central to their lives. We have language and widespread cooperation, which (chimps) don't need to worry about, and maybe that impairs our performance in these simple competitions, maybe these were costs we paid for other abilities," he says.
Chimpanzees are very competitive, while humans can be more cooperative. Chimp communication is mostly nonverbal, while in humans it's just the opposite, the researchers noted.
"While young chimpanzees hone their competitive skills with constant practice, playing hide-and-seek and wrestling," Caltech lead researcher Colin Camerer explained, "their human counterparts shift at a young age from competition to cooperation using our special skill at language."
Previous studies have also shown chimps have excellent short-term memories, which is helpful in simple, repetitive tasks such as the game presented to them in the study.
