Monkeys Understand Value of Money - Research
Monkeys are one step closer to running the Federal Reserve and would probably do a much better job than their human counterparts, new research suggests. Scientists at the Italian National Research Center in Rome, Italy have proven that capuchins can understand the symbolic value of a mundane object.
Read More (Source: Nature)But the monkeys behaved differently with real food and with tokens. This was apparent when the monkeys had to decide whether a large amount of a less-tasty food would be better than a single piece of their favourite food. In both tests there came a point when lots of B, or B tokens, would be chosen over a single piece of A, or an A token.
With real food, this threshold was around three pieces of B. But for the token test much more of the less-favoured food needed to be offered before the monkey would choose that option.
It's unclear why this should be the case, says Addessi. “They are able to reason with tokens as with real food, but they find it more difficult to reason with tokens,” she says. This behaviour is similar to that of a small child.
An alternative explanation might be that tokens are an abstract concept. The monkeys become less good at comparing two abstract sets of food – in a similar way to how many people spend more freely with a credit card than with cold, hard cash.
