Overview
- Published in Science on October 30, 2025, the study shows chimpanzees weigh evidence strength and update choices in food-hiding tasks.
- In the defeater condition, the apes abandoned earlier cues once shown they were false, opting for more reliable signals.
- The animals distinguished redundant weak clues from genuinely new ones and favored new information when it added evidence.
- Tightly controlled protocols and computational models ruled out simpler strategies such as recency bias or responding to the most obvious cue.
- A multi-institutional team including Hanna Schleihauf, Emily Sanford, and Jan Engelmann reports they are collecting data from 2–4-year-old children and preparing tests with other primates.