What Guides a Search for Food That Has Disappeared? Experiments on Cotton-Top Tamarins (Saguinus oedipus )

When food is launched down a vertically positioned S-shaped opaque tube, cotton-top tamarins ( Saguinus oedipus ) search for the food in the position directly beneath the release point, even though over several trials it never appears in this position ( B. M. Hood et al., 1999 ). Experiment 1 showed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of comparative psychology (1983) 2001-06, Vol.115 (2), p.140-151
Main Authors: Hauser, Marc D, Williams, Travis, Kralik, Jerald D, Moskovitz, Damian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal
Animal cognition
Animals
Appetitive Behavior
Female
Male
Monkeys
Monkeys & apes
Practice (Psychology)
Problem Solving
Response Bias
Response Generalization
Saguinus - psychology
Spatial Orientation (Perception)
Transfer (Psychology)
Visual Search
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Summary:When food is launched down a vertically positioned S-shaped opaque tube, cotton-top tamarins ( Saguinus oedipus ) search for the food in the position directly beneath the release point, even though over several trials it never appears in this position ( B. M. Hood et al., 1999 ). Experiment 1 showed that when the trajectory of the food shifts from the vertical to the horizontal plane, tamarins no longer show systematic perseverative errors and, in general, perform better on this invisible displacement task. Experiment 2 showed that tamarins with experience on the horizontal task show less of a bias when tested on the vertical task but nonetheless fail overall to solve this invisible displacement problem; their performance is substantially worse than it was on the horizontal task. Experiment 3 revealed that when the vertically positioned tube is replaced by an occluded ramp, tamarins consistently search in the compartment below the release point, even though most of the tamarins had experience in Experiments 1 and 2. Overall, results indicate that tamarins have a significant gravity bias when searching for food that has disappeared along the vertical plane but also have more general problems finding food that has moved out of sight.
ISSN:0735-7036
1939-2087
DOI:10.1037/0735-7036.115.2.140