Audience presence influences cognitive task performance in chimpanzees.

Human cognitive performance can be significantly influenced by the presence of audience members. While often associated with reputation management, which is considered uniquely human, it is unclear to what degree this phenomenon is shared with non-human animals. To investigate such audience effects in chimpanzees, we recorded the performance of six chimpanzees on three different numerical touch screen tasks varying in difficulty and cognitive demand, in the presence of variable audience member compositions over six years.