Information seeking in western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla)

Many animals will seek information when they do not know the answer to a problem, suggesting that they monitor their knowledge state. In the classic "tubes task," subjects are presented with a set of opaque tubes and either see (visible trials) or do not see (hidden trials) which tube holds a food reward on a given trial. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and human children show information-seeking behavior on this task, looking into the tubes to find the reward more on hidden than on visible trials. However, evidence for information-seeking behavior in gorillas is limited. In Experiment 1, gorillas that were presented with a classic information-seeking tubes task showed performance patterns consistent with metacognitive behavior; they looked down tubes more on hidden than on visible trials, their accuracy on hidden trials on which they looked was higher than on hidden trials on which they did not look, and they primarily employed an appropriate search strategy when looking down the tubes. In Experiment 2, we decreased or increased the amount of effort required to look down the tubes by increasing or decreasing the height of the tubes, respectively. Gorillas were less likely to look in tubes on trials that required high effort, but continued to look more on hidden than on visible trials, indicating that their tendency to look was affected by both knowledge state and effort. Together these results provide strong evidence for logical, controlled information-seeking behavior by gorillas.