London - They may not be able to discuss the finer points of The Exorcist or Carrie but chimps, it seems, do like a good horror movie.
Shown films in which an actor dressed in a King Kong suit attacked a human or was bludgeoned with a hammer by a man, they watched the action intently.
But unlike many human movie-goers, they didn’t look away or cover their eyes. In fact, they were so engrossed they ignored treats they had been given.
The researchers said: “We were giving juice while showing the videos but some of them even forgot to drink the juice and stared at the movies.” A spokesperson for the journal Current Biology said: “The apes really seemed to enjoy the movies.”
The discovery was made by scientists at Japan’s Kyoto University who were investigating the long-term memory capacity of chimps and bonobos.
Twelve apes were shown two specially prepared films twice, 24-hours apart, while their eye movements were tracked. In the first film, an actor in an ape suit burst out of one of two doors in the background, attacked a man in the foreground and stole the banana he was eating. In the second, it was the “ape” that was assaulted.
The eye-tracking showed the apes remembered what they’d seen and anticipated the attacks. On second viewing, they began to look at the door the actor would emerge from a few seconds before the scene started.
This, say the researchers, shows they were able to store information about the films and retrieve and manipulate it when required.
Daily Mail