Weight as Impediment
This chapter reports on a series of studies to examine if chimpanzees could infer the weight of large objects based on observing the effort that others (people and apes, alike) exerted while lifting and moving them. The studies had two broad aims. First, researchers wanted to develop a task which would allow them to compare their chimpanzees' ability to reason about weight in the arbitrary (although explicit) weight-sorting tasks, to a more spontaneous, problem-solving situation. Their second aim was to present a weight-related problem to their apes in a fairly dramatic fashion, with the hope of heightening their motivation to attend to the critical variable being manipulated: namely, weight. In the studies chimpanzees were made to decide whether to try to pull in a heavy or light box in order to obtain a food reward. The box-pulling and weight-sorting tasks yielded a consistent pattern of results: namely, distinct limitations on the apes' ability to make inferences about the weight of objects in simple, problem-solving situations.
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