Abstract
There are cute stories of zoo-living apes that seem to recognize their former caregivers. They also seem to recognize familiar apes and tell them apart from strangers. But we don’t know how detailed their memory is. We also don’t know how long their memory lasts. Humans have good social memories, and other great apes are our closest living relatives. We wanted to know if long-lasting social memory is a trait we share with other great apes.
We tested the ability of apes to recognize familiar individuals after spending years apart. We used an eye-tracker to see how long apes looked at two side-by-side images of other apes. We found that apes looked longer at previous groupmates than at strangers. They also looked longer at groupmates with whom they had positive interactions. This helps us understand the evolutionary history of social memory in great apes.
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