Chimpanzees form impressions of conspecifics’ skills in puzzle box tasks

Chimpanzees collaborate with conspecifics in their daily life. However, the cognitive processes underlying partner recruitment aren’t fully understood. In the current study, chimpanzees needed to recruit a conspecific partner for either a cooperative or competitive experimental task. They spontaneously preferred to recruit cooperation partners who had previously solved a solo version of this or another task successfully, over partners who had failed. In contrast, the chimpanzees needed to experience the consequences of competing against co-action partners before settling on a preference for the unsuccessful partner. This divergent pattern may be due to increased cognitive demands of competitive compared to cooperative tasks, or the consequence of an order effect in the current experimental design. Despite the observed differences of social information use in our cooperative and competitive experimental tasks, the findings are exciting as they extend our knowledge of chimpanzee’s social evaluation abilities by showing that they can draw domain-specific inferences about conspecifics’ skills.