eprintid: 33924 rev_number: 15 eprint_status: archive userid: 1482 importid: 105 dir: disk0/00/03/39/24 datestamp: 2020-02-06 09:16:21 lastmod: 2021-09-02 13:22:47 status_changed: 2021-09-02 13:22:47 type: article metadata_visibility: show creators_name: De Petrillo, Francesca creators_name: Rosati, Alexandra creators_idrefppn: 241586674 creators_affiliation: University of Michigan; Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse;Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione creators_halaffid: 506116 title: Rhesus macaques use probabilities to predict future events ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_ECO abstract: Humans can use an intuitive sense of statistics to make predictions about uncertain future events, a cognitive skill that underpins logical and mathematical reasoning. Recent research shows that some of these abilities for statistical inferences can emerge in preverbal infants and non-human primates such as apes and capuchins. An important question is therefore whether animals share the full complement of intuitive reasoning abilities demonstrated by humans, as well as what evolutionary contexts promote the emergence of such skills. Here, we examined whether free-ranging rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) can use probability information to infer the most likely outcome of a random lottery, in the first test of whether primates can make such inferences in the absence of direct prior experience. We developed a novel expectancy-violation looking time task, adapted from prior studies of infants, in order to assess the monkeys' expectations. In Study 1, we confirmed that monkeys (n = 20) looked similarly at different sampled items if they had no prior knowledge about the population they were drawn from. In Study 2, monkeys (n = 80) saw a dynamic ‘lottery’ machine containing a mix of two types of fruit outcomes, and then saw either the more common fruit (expected trial) or the relatively rare fruit (unexpected trial) fall from the machine. We found that monkeys looked longer when they witnessed the unexpected outcome. In Study 3, we confirmed that this effect depended on the causal relationship between the sample and the population, not visual mismatch: monkeys (n = 80) looked equally at both outcomes if the experimenter pulled the sampled item from her pocket. These results reveal that rhesus monkeys spontaneously use information about probability to reason about likely outcomes, and show how comparative studies of nonhumans can disentangle the evolutionary history of logical reasoning capacities. date: 2019-09 date_type: published publisher: Elsevier id_number: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2019.05.006 official_url: http://iast.fr/pub/123158 faculty: tse divisions: tse keywords: Intuitive statistics keywords: Probabilistic reasoning keywords: Logical inferences keywords: Non-human primates language: en has_fulltext: FALSE doi: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2019.05.006 view_date_year: 2019 full_text_status: none publication: Evolution and Human Behavior volume: vol. 40 number: n° 5 pagerange: 436-446 refereed: TRUE issn: 1090-5138 oai_identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:123158 harvester_local_overwrite: official_url harvester_local_overwrite: faculty harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: publisher harvester_local_overwrite: creators_affiliation harvester_local_overwrite: hal_id harvester_local_overwrite: hal_version harvester_local_overwrite: hal_url harvester_local_overwrite: hal_passwd harvester_local_overwrite: doi harvester_local_overwrite: id_number harvester_local_overwrite: number harvester_local_overwrite: volume harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid oai_lastmod: 2021-08-09T08:15:45Z oai_set: tse site: ut1 publish_to_hal: TRUE hal_id: hal-02468806 hal_passwd: lglab2 hal_version: 1 hal_url: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02468806 citation: De Petrillo, Francesca and Rosati, Alexandra (2019) Rhesus macaques use probabilities to predict future events. Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 40 (n° 5). pp. 436-446.