Computerised technology is an increasingly popular tool for cognitive testing with non-human animals and has numerous benefits, such as tighter control over stimuli presentation and recording responses. Recently, virtual environment (VE) software has been successfully implemented in cognitive research with non-human primates. In VEs, novel stimuli can be presented in innovative ways allowing us to study phenomena in novel ways unrestricted by real-world space. We present evidence from capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella) in a delayed-response task within a VE presented on a touchscreen. We compared capuchins' short-term memory performance between a VE task and an equivalent physical task. Preliminary data shows an effect of delay on accuracy in the VE, as in the physical task. We show that VE are a feasible method for studying cognition with capuchin monkeys, offering an engaging way to study primate cognition in without the physical constraints that are often present when designing apparatuses.

Effective social co-ordination benefits from mentally representing a partner’s actions. Chimpanzees can successfully work together, but the cognitive mechanisms they employ to aid social co-ordination remain unclear. Studies of action planning show that, like humans, chimpanzees demonstrate the end-state-comfort effect; considering the end of an action sequence during motor-planning, e.g. using an initially awkward grasp when handling an overturned glass to facilitate how it will end up being held. Human research shows that we extend this to a partner; we pass objects in a way that facilitates the action to be performed with them. Here, we assessed the location in which chimpanzees passed a tool to an experimenter to investigate action accommodation. We manipulated experimenter hand location and their ease of access to locations and found some effect on passing behaviour indicating that, under certain conditions, chimpanzees consider a partner’s actions when planning their own actions in a co-ordination context.

Adults are known to have superior working memory to children, but whether this improvement is driven primarily by differences in storage capacity or attentional control is debated. In particular, the understanding of how capacity and control influence the development of working memory is hampered by the fact that most theorizing about the effect of variation in either on behavior has been verbal. To address this, we extended a computational model of working memory to clearly separate the contributions of capacity and control, fitting the model to a recent developmental study. We find that the combined influence of capacity and control on working memory may be more complicated than previously appreciated. In particular, the general pattern of qualitative differences between children and adults could be produced by increasing either capacity or control alone. These results point to a need for additional experimental paradigms to clearly parse the differential impact of working memory components.