How environmental unpredictability and harshness affect chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in risk-choice and temporal discounting tasks

Citation

Sánchez-Amaro A, Tan J, Kaufhold SP, Fernández-Navarro S & Rossano F (2021) How environmental unpredictability and harshness affect chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in risk-choice and temporal discounting tasks. Journal of comparative psychology.

Abstract
Animals need to adjust their decision-making strategies to the ecological challenges of their environment. Variation in ecological unpredictability and harshness thus seem to affect their decisions in the wild. In our study, we combine methods from human life history theory and previous comparative work with chimpanzees to investigate whether current variability in ecological factors such as reward unpredictability and harshness affect chimpanzees’ decision-making strategies in two value-based scenarios. We presented chimpanzees with choices varying in the probability of obtaining food rewards (risk-choice task) and in their temporal availability (temporal discounting task). These scenarios were preceded by different sets of priming phases mimicking variability in resource unpredictability (predictable or unpredictable rewards) and harshness (abundant or scarce rewards). In addition, we implemented a social manipulation to explore whether variations in unpredictable gains and losses affected chimpanzees’ performance in both tasks. We found that chimpanzees were only affected by the social manipulation in the risk-choice scenario. Specifically, after a period of constant food losses chimpanzees became less risk prone. We discuss how different types of negative experiences affect chimpanzees’ decisions.

Journal
Journal of comparative psychology: Volume 135, Issue 2