Chimpanzees might be the champion learners of the animal world but they still have some catching up to do before they can compete with toddlers, scientists have discovered.

While humanity’s closest relatives are celebrated for their complex communities, with their own distinct cultures, their social learning skills fail to match those of pre-school children, new research has shown.

An experiment comparing the abilities of adult chimps and orang-utans with the skills of 2½-year-old children has found that all three were equally good at tasks of physical and spatial intelligence, such as tracking pieces of food that had been moved or determining which of two piles of food was bigger. When tests involved communication and social understanding, however, the toddlers came out well ahead.

When a human adult demonstrated how to retrieve food from a transparent tube by popping it open, for example, the children were almost always able to copy the action immediately and accurately and get the reward. Both ape species, by contrast, failed to understand what the experimenter had done, and instead tried to bite or tear apart the tube to get at the food.

The children were also better at following an adult’s gaze, and at pointing towards a cup hiding a reward.

In the tasks designed to assess physical and quantitative abilities, children achieved a score of 68 per cent – the same as chimps and only a little more than orang-utans, who were successful 59 per cent of the time. In the communication and social tasks, however, the toddlers scored 74 per cent, compared with 36 per cent for chimps and 33 per cent for orang-utans.

The study, led by Esther Herrmann, of the Maz Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, suggests that higher social skills are uniquely human. This particularly applies to a concept known as “theory of mind” – essentially being able to see things from another’s point of view.

“We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human,” Dr Herrmann said. “Social cognition skills are critical for learning. The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another’s solution to a problem and understanding the intentions of others.”

This indicates that many of these qualities are probably unique to humans, and have evolved since the human and chimp family trees diverged about six million years ago.

The tests, the results of which are published in the journal Science, are the first to compare systematically the cognitive skills of children, chimps and orang-utans.

Children of 2½ were chosen for the study because they have broadly similar physical coordination skills to adult chimps. The chimps and orang-utans ranged in age from 3 to 21.

Dr Herrman said: “The current results provide strong support for the cultural intelligence hypothesis, that humans have evolved some specialised sociocognitive skills, beyond those of primates in general, for living and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups. Young human children who have been walking and talking for about a year, but who were still several years away from literacy and formal schooling, performed at basically an equivalent level to chimpanzees on tasks of physical cognition, but far outstripped both chimpanzees and orang-utans on tasks of social cognition.

“This was true at both the most general and the most specific level of analysis, for individuals never before exposed to these tests, and across the most comprehensive test battery ever given to multiple primate species.”

In a separate study, also published in Science, a Harvard University team found that nonhuman primates expected others to behave rationally, and could work out what their intentions were in certain circumstances. The research assessed the behaviour of more than 120 primates, including cotton-top tamarins, rhesus macaques and chimpanzees. The species were chosen to represent the three main primate groups – New World monkeys, Old World monkeys and apes.

In one experiment the primates watched as an experimenter either grasped a food container purposefully, or accidentally flopped his hand on to one. All three species then tended to grab the container that had been deliberately gripped, showing that they understood it was a goal-oriented action.

Justin Wood, who led the study, said: “A dominant view has been that nonhuman primates attend only to what actions ‘look like’ when trying to understand what others are thinking.

“In contrast, our research shows that nonhuman primates infer others’ intentions in a much more sophisticated way. They expect other individuals to perform the most rational action that they can, given the environmental obstacles that they face.”

Physical tests
–– Locating a reward
–– Tracking a reward after its location changes
–– Discriminating quantity
–– Using a stick to retrieve a reward that is out of reach

Scores
68% Toddlers
68% Chimpanzees
59% Orang-utans

Social tests
–– Solving a simple but not obvious problem by observing a demonstrated solution
–– Understanding communicated clues to a reward’s hidden location
–– Pointing at cups to retrieve a hidden reward
–– Following an actor’s gaze direction to a target

Scores
74% Toddlers
36% Chimpanzees
33% Orang-utans

Source: Science

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