For better or worse, humans are really good at thinking about how events could have turned out differently if we had acted in a different way. My research is trying to ask whether this is something unique to humans or something that we share with our closest living relatives. Regret and anticipated regret are one of the most effective way that humans adapt our behaviour and learn from our mistakes, so looking for its presence in chimpanzees is very valuable. Before we investigate regret and relief we will first investigate ‘counterfactual curiosity’; a counterfactual is a hypothetical way that events could have turned out differently, so counterfactual curiosity is showing an interest in the alternative possible outcomes.
To test this we use a simple uncertainty task where I will covertly bait 3 covered tubes with either a medium piece of apple, a large piece of apple or nothing. This test is going to be investigating whether they look into tubes to find out alternative possible results, so to start with we need to test whether they look into tubes to find out the answer before their choice. So in the first session the ends of the tube will be uncovered so that they can look into the tubes and select the largest piece. Then when they move onto the real experiment the ends of the tube will be covered and I will then give them a choice between two of the three tubes. This means that when they find out what they did get, they don’t know what they missed out on. If they got a medium piece then this could be a good outcome if the choice was between medium and nothing, but a bad outcome if it was a choice between medium and large. After we have given them time to eat whatever piece they got, we uncover the ends of the unchosen tubes so that they can stoop down and look into them if they want. I believe that they will be more curious to look into the tube that they could have chosen than to the one that was never available to them and that they will look into the tubes most often when they receive the medium sized piece.
