Child development specialists often evaluate a patient’s ability to complete tasks involving multiple steps. It turns out, many chimpanzees would pass these tests with flying colors, according to a report in the journal PeerJ.
“We find objective evidence that wild chimpanzees break down technical tasks into manageable subtasks, and address these subtasks one-by-one, similarly to humans,” says Elliot Howard-Spink, an author of the study. He performed the research while at Oxford, but now is at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.
How Chimps Breakdown Tasks
Both humans and chimps rely on two separate, but related strategies. First, they sequence — dividing complex tasks into discrete steps. Then they chunk by bundling related steps together.
