Computerized drawing, sorting, and fingermaze tasks for chimpanzees
IVER H. IVERSEN  (University of North Florida)

The presentation will describe how two adult, captive chimpanzees, with considerable laboratory experience, were trained to on several tasks using a touchmonitor. Drawing: Movement of the finger over the monitor surface left a trace of "electronic ink". The subjects were trained to connect dots on the monitor and to trace lines. The drawing became highly accurate and predictable illustrating how such complex human like behavior can be trained in chimpanzees. Sorting: In a sorting task, the subjects were trained to move objects presented at the top of the monitor to "trays" at the bottom of the monitor. The objects had to be sorted according to the criterion of identity, such that, for example, circle-shaped objects should be placed on one tray and triangle-shaped objects should be placed on another tray. Sorting became 100% correct and generalized to new objects and colors. However, when three trays were presented the subjects did not immediately transfer the skill to the new situation, they used the two side trays only. After training to place objects on the middle tray they immediately transferred the sorting task to three trays and therefore could sort in three categories. Fingermaze: The subjects had to move a "ball" on the screen to a small target. Visual objects on the screen formed a maze of obstacles that the ball could not pass through. The subjects were taught to move the finger in the maze in several steps of gradually more difficult mazes. Once the subjects had acquired the training mazes, new mazes were presented to determine the generality of the task. Both subjects transferred the skill to 65-100% of the new mazes, depending on the configuration of the mazes. The experiments demonstrate that  captive chimpanzees can be trained to perform very complex tasks that require considerable hand-eye coordination and which ordinarily are only performed by human subjects.