A nonhuman primate's perception of object relations: experiments on cottontop tamarins, Saguinus oedipus

Objects in nature often have spatial and functional relationships with other objects. For example, fruit may be connected to tree branches, bushes sometimes function as landmarks for home, and stones are functionally associated with nuts when they are used to crack the nuts open. Although animals may use the spatial and functional relationships between specific objects, it is important for ethologists interested in cognitive mechanisms to ask whether animals understand the spatial relationship between objects in a more general and abstract way. In this experiment, we ask whether a small New World monkey, the cottontop tamarin, is capable of perceiving the abstract relational concept of ‘connectedness’. Using a traditional operant paradigm, subjects were required to press one button to images with connected objects, and another button to images with separated objects. In Phase 1 of the experiment, subjects received training with only one connected and one separated image. Following training, probe images were presented in which features such as colour, texture and shape were systematically manipulated to determine which features were more important in stimulus classification. Accuracies and reaction times of responses were recorded. On the basis of their performance, the tamarins appeared to recognize that changes in the colour or texture of two objects plays no functional role in determining whether such objects are connected or separated. In contrast, changes in the shape and distance between two objects does play an important functional role, and the tamarins appeared to be sensitive to such changes. In Phase 2, subjects received training with a larger set of images. After this training, classification accuracy remained significantly above chance with most probes, suggesting that the tamarins had acquired a more general connectedness concept. In Phase 3, novel images were presented. Classification accuracy was significantly above chance for many of the novel images. Overall, results suggest that tamarins perceive spatial relationships between stimuli to some extent and can classify images based in part on their spatial relationship. Other recent experiments have shown that cottontop tamarins respond to spatial relationships even better than in the current experiment when they have to act directly on the objects. The difference between these results suggests that tamarins perceive the spatial relationships between objects more readily in the context of an ecologically valid problem.