Huge thanks to keeper and research team @edinburghzoo.bsky.social for their support on this project! (4/4)

We discuss our results in the context of chimpanzee communication during social tasks and the parameters that do and do not constitute coordination from the subjects' perspective (3/4)

Chimpanzees reliably produced communication behaviours in the event of a breakdown in coordination and differed qualitatively in their operation of our see-saw apparatus depending on whether they learned it in a social or non-social setting. (2/4)

🤝 This work was of course a group effort, and I’d like to thank all of my co-authors for their help along the way: @realprimatthias.bsky.social, Josep Call, Sarah Koopman, Emilie Rapport Munro, Cristóbal Bottero Cantuarias, Charlie Menzel, Francine Dolins, Karline Janmaat, and Ken Schweller

🐒 Since starting this work, our training protocol has been used with more great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas) across several zoos, as well as the Capuchin monkeys in Edinburgh Zoo (watch this space to see how they’ve been getting on with @amiscov.bsky.social and Amanda Seed)

🐶 We hope that others can use our training protocol to implement virtual environment research with more individuals and across more species, and we encourage using and adapting our flexible yet structured method

🏞️ We've already seen that virtual environments can be used to study spatial cognition in great apes (www.science.org/doi/full/10....), and we think that much more can be done with this technology

🎮 There's still a lot we don't know about how these virtual worlds are represented by non-human primates, but training the basic gameplay mechanisms is the first step towards investigating this and other cognitive phenomena!

🦧 We developed this method while working with some experienced chimpanzees, orang-utans with no prior experience with touchscreens, and chimpanzees in a group setting, each presenting their own training challenges!

🍎 Co-led by @realprimatthias.bsky.social, we present our touchscreen training method using the freely available APExplorer software for #chimpanzees and #orangutans to learn to navigate virtual environments and ‘collect’ virtual fruit, in Zoo Leipzig/MPI-EVA WKPRC and @edinburghzoo.bsky.social/BRU

🐧 Extra special thanks to @rzss keepers who collaborated with me on this project! (5/5)

🧠 Humans and chimpanzees may share common cognitive mechanisms or predispositions that support social/joint interactions. (4/5)

☕In humans, this sort of action accommodation is an important part of how we interact smoothly; like passing someone a cup of coffee to their free hand! (3/5)

Across a series of experiments in Leipzig Zoo and
@rzss Edinburgh Zoo, in our #OpenAccess article out now in
@CognitionJourn, #chimpanzees passed a tool to an experimenter in a way that accommodated the experimenter’s action constraints (2/5)