Memory of movies by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

How do animals remember what they see in daily life? The processes involved in remembering such visual information may be similar to those used in int erpreting moving images on a monitor. In Experiment 1, 4 adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were required to discriminate between movies using a movi e-to-movie matching-to-sample task. All chimpanzees demonstrated the abilit y to discriminate movies from the very 1st session onward. In Experiment 2, the ability to retain a movie was investigated through a matching-to-sampl e task using movie stills. To test which characteristics of movies are rele vant to memory, the authors compared 2 conditions. In the continuous condit ion, the scenes comprising the movie progressed gradually, whereas in the d iscrete condition, the authors introduced a sudden change from one scene to another. Chimpanzees showed a recency effect only in the discrete conditio n, suggesting that composition and temporal order of scenes were used to re member the movies.