Video Game Helps Chimps Becoming Self Aware

Video Game Helps Chimps Becoming Self Aware

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Recently, a Japanese research group conducted a trial on a set of female chimps set out to determine their level of awareness when playing a simple video game. Their results were fairly astounding...

Chimps playing a video game can apparently recognize which characters they control, a feature of self-awareness that could shed light on the evolution of the self in humans, researchers said.

Three female adult chimpanzees were trained to move a white cursor on a touch screen by rolling a trackball. The aim was to hit green rectangular targets with the cursor.

"At the beginning of training, we had no idea how to train chimpanzees to use this device," said researcher Takaaki Kaneko, a comparative psychologist at Kyoto University in Japan. "Sometimes, we lay completely down on the floor to make the chimpanzees pay attention to the trackball."

The chimps scored correctly 99 percent of the time, researchers found. "I personally believed that chimpanzees perceive self-agency in a similar way to which we humans do, and we have experimentally proven that here," Kaneko told LiveScience.

Rise of the Chimps [Apes] anyone??? This can't be good can it?!?!?

For more on the project go here.