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Early sensorimotor development in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
1Institute of Psychology, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Rome, Italy.
Abstract:
The cognitive and locomotor development of 4 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) during their 1st year of life was examined with Piagetian theory and method as paradigm. The infant chimpanzees progressed through the same 4 stages of development as babies do. However, the chimpanzees seemed less developed than babies in object exploration and in object-object combination. When chimpanzee early cognition is compared with that of other nonhuman primates, chimpanzees appear more advanced than gorillas, capuchins, and macaques in these same areas of cognition and similar to orangutans. A unitary explantation of the relative advances and delays in chimpanzee early cognition, which refers to the relation between rates of locomotor and cognitive development, is proposed.