Can non-human primates extract the linear trend from a noisy scatterplot?

Recent studies showed that humans, regardless of age, education, and culture, can extract the linear trend of a noisy scatterplot. Although this capacity looks sophisticated, it may simply reflect the extraction of the principal trend of the graph, as if the cloud of dots was processed as an oriented object. To test this idea, we trained Guinea baboons to associate arbitrary shapes with the increasing or decreasing trends of noiseless and noisy scatterplots, while varying the number of points, the noise level, and the regression slope.

Cognitive flexibility and sociality in Guinea baboons (Papio papio).

Cognitive flexibility is an executive function playing an important role in problem solving and the adaptation to contextual changes. While most studies investigated the contribution of cognitive flexibility to solve problems in the physical domain, the current study on baboons (Papio papio) investigated its contribution to sociality. The current study verified whether there is a relationship between cognitive flexibility at the individual level and the position of the individuals within their social group.

A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults.

In humans, simple 2D visual displays of launching events ("Michottean launches") can evoke the impression of causality. Direct launching events are regarded as causal, but similar events with a temporal and/or spatial gap between the movements of the two objects, as non-causal. This ability to distinguish between causal and non-causal events is perceptual in nature and develops early and preverbally in infancy.

Humans (Homo sapiens) but not baboons (Papio papio) demonstrate crossmodal pitch-luminance correspondence.

Humans spontaneously and consistently map information coming from different sensory modalities. Surprisingly, the phylogenetic origin of such cross-modal correspondences has been under-investigated. A notable exception is the study of Ludwig et al.

Chunking as a function of sequence length.

Chunking mechanisms are central to several cognitive processes. During the acquisition of visuo-motor sequences, it is commonly reported that these sequences are segmented into chunks leading to more fluid, rapid, and accurate performances. The question of a chunk's storage capacity has been often investigated but little is known about the dynamics of chunk size evolution relative to sequence length.