Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In humans, out-of-sight events and objects can be referred through language. Such referentiality serves a function to convey information that could be used when we face the referents afterwards. However, it is unclear whether the comprehension of those information’s referentiality is shared in non-linguistic animals. To address this, we explored whether chimpanzees would utilize video information when they face its referent in another room later. They first watched a food-hiding event (food being hidden into either a green or red cup) through video in one room. They, then, moved to the next room and received a choice test to locate the food. Two out of five chimpanzees performed better than expected by chance. This suggests that like humans, chimpanzees can utilize referential information across time and space between the two rooms, at least based on correspondence between objects in video and those in real.