How do chimpanzees learn about new environments – where food is located, how to capture prey, and how to navigate between different places? We are investigating these questions using a virtual environment called Adventure Park that the chimpanzees can move around in using a touchscreen. Adventure Park is huge and filled with trees, rocks, islands in a lake, a waterfall, a cliff, and more! There are various fruits scattered around, which the chimpanzees can collect to receive real fruit rewards. In one location in the environment, there is a lot of food clustered close together, and we’re interested to see if the chimpanzees learn and remember this location and take the shortest path to it. Another location has fruit that, once collected, reappears after a few minutes. Will the chimpanzees learn that they can re-collect this fruit, and will they figure out approximately when it reappears? These tasks mimic the foraging challenges that chimpanzees face in the wild: remembering where high densities of fruit are located and how soon they can revisit the same fruit trees after eating from them.

Adventure Park also contains different types of prey – rabbits and pigs – that the chimpanzees can catch for fruit rewards. The rabbits are slow enough to catch by chasing, but the pigs are faster, so the chimpanzees have to figure out a different way to catch them. Will the chimpanzees learn to distinguish between the different types of prey and use different strategies to catch them?