A study has found that monkeys become more calculating in money matters

IT seems even monkeys know the value of money. A new research found that when presented with coin-like tokens, tiny yet savvy capuchin monkeys inhibit their natural impulses and make more calculated, rewarding decisions. The study provides the first demonstration that inherently worthless tokens, such as poker chips or coins, help monkeys to make more strategic decisions under certain situations.

Despite undergoing 35 million years of evolution independent of us, the monkeys’ related skills appear to be on a par with those of chimpanzees and three-year-old children. Monkeys will wheel and deal for peanuts — literally. "Peanuts are the favourite food for all of the capuchins in our colony," Discovery News quoted lead author Elsa Addessi as saying.

Addessi and co-author Sabrina Rossi, who are both at the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, conducted the study. Eight capuchin monkeys housed at the institute participated.

The researchers set up what is known as a reverse-reward test, where the monkeys had to select a smaller quantity of food or tokens in order to receive a larger reward. The reward consisted of chopped peanuts. Blue plastic poker chips, a small grey PVC cylinder, a brass plug, a metal nut, a black metal key and a silver metal band served as tokens.

At first, all the monkeys went for the largest amounts, choosing the biggest peanut or token piles. They always did this when they saw food, but they were later able to curb this natural tendency with the tokens, which seemed to provide what, the researchers said, was "psychological distancing from the incentive features of food."

Two of the monkeys, in particular, a male named Sandokan and a female named Robinia, repeatedly aced the tests. For example, when presented with 1 and 2 tokens, Sandokan chose 1 and received his peanut reward. He figured out the needed strategy too. When presented with 2 and 5 tokens, he selected 2, and again got his peanuts.

"The capacity of associating a symbolic stimulus (the tokens, in this case) with a reward and the capacity of reasoning on different types of symbolic stimuli in order to choose between them is an important prerequisite for the evolution of money use in humans, which was quite a slow process developing over thousands of years," Addessi said. "In this sense, we can say that the use of money evolved from non-human primate symbolic abilities." Capuchin monkeys do not use tokens in the wild, so even if they can be taught things like very basic money skills and how to play an incredibly simple game of poker, these activities are restricted to human-orchestrated testing.

Nevertheless, "both good inhibition skills and the capacity of evaluating the quality and the quantity of two options before making a choice are fundamental for wild capuchins’ survival in their environment," Addessi added. The study appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. — ANI

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