Chimps and 3- to 4- year old children share similar attention shifting abilities

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-01-18 11:01

International

Image by Simon Bardet from Pixabay

When it comes to juggling attention between different tasks, chimpanzees may have the same abilities as a 3- to 4- year old human child, according to international researchers. The team conducted a series of experiments with chimps and children to switch attention between two shelves to choose the correct cup for a reward. When pitted against 5-year-old children, the chimps began to fall behind on the task, suggesting that unique changes in the human brain occur from five years of age, they say. The ability to shift attention between different tasks, roles or conversations requires mental effort and played an important role in human evolution, say the researchers, enabling humans to develop problem-solving, make and follow long-term plans, and analogical reasoning (solving new problems by applying knowledge from similar problems).

Media release

From: The Royal Society

The Shifting Shelf task: A new, non-verbal measure for attentional set shifting

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Summary: Shifting attention between different tasks, roles or conversations requires mental effort. Yet, the ability to flexibly switch attention played an important role for human evolution, enabling other skills, such as problem-solving (“thinking outside the box”), making and following long-term plans (often several in parallel, e.g., think about your weekly to-to list) or analogical reasoning. How do other animals compare to us in their attention shifting abilities? This study presents a new task measuring attention shifting and suggests that chimpanzees and 3- to 4-year-old children have comparable attention-shifting skills, while unique changes happen in humans from 5 years of age.

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The University of St Andrews, UK

Funder: The research of A.M.S. was supported by a ‘INQMINDS’ ERC Starting Grant no. (SEP-210159400). The funding sources had no involvement in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of the data, writing the paper, nor in the decision to submit the article for publication.

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