ArticleCurrent biology : CB2018
Self-Control in Chimpanzees Relates to General Intelligence.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Exploring the relationship between inhibitory control and coping behaviour in horses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The role of future planning, patience, and risk tolerance for prospective reciprocity in human adults.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- ManyFishes: a big team science collaboration on fish comparative cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- CapuchinAI 1.0: Development of a machine learning-based touchscreen paradigm to test cognition in wild capuchins.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Assessing the limits of delay of gratification in bumble bees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Embodied cognitive evolution and the limits of convergence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Sex affects the network of covariances between cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits in guppies.iScience · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sociocognitive traits in semi-free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Measuring self-control in a wild songbird using a spatial discounting task.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Inhibitory control in teleost fish: a methodological and conceptual review.Animal cognition · 2024Review
- Interspecific differences in developmental mode determine early cognitive abilities in teleost fish.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Tolerant macaque species are less impulsive and reactive.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Adaptive phenotypic plasticity induces individual variability along a cognitive trade-off.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Great ape cognition is structured by stable cognitive abilities and predicted by developmental conditions.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- I'll (not) take that: The reverse-reward contingency task as a test of self-control and inhibition.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Waiting for a better possibility: delay of gratification in corvids and its relationship to other cognitive capacities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Control of Attention in Rhesus Monkeys Measured Using a Flanker Task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Intra- and interspecific variation in self-control capacities of parrots in a delay of gratification task.Animal cognition · 2022Article
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Abstract
For humans, there appears to be a clear link between general intelligence and self-control behavior, such as sustained delay of gratification [1-9]. Chimpanzees also delay gratification [10-12] and can be given tests of general intelligence (g) [13-15], but these two constructs have never been compared within the same sample of nonhuman animals. We presented 40 chimpanzees with the hybrid delay task (HDT) [16, 17], which measures inter-temporal choices and the capacity for sustained delay of gratification, and the primate cognitive test battery (PCTB), which measures g in chimpanzees [13-15]. Importantly, none of the sub-tasks in the PCTB directly assesses self-control or other forms of behavioral inhibition. Rather, they assess areas of physical cognition (e.g., quantity discrimination) or social cognition (e.g., gaze following). In three phases of testing, we consistently found that the strongest relation was between chimpanzee g scores and efficiency in the HDT. Chimpanzee g was not most closely related to the proportion of trials the chimpanzees chose to try to wait for delayed rewards, but rather most closely related to how good they were at waiting for those rewards when they chose to do so. We also found the same strong relation between HDT efficiency and those factors in the PCTB that loaded most strongly on chimpanzee g. These results highlight that, as with humans, there is a strong relation between chimpanzees' self-control and overall intelligence-a relation that likely reflects the role of successful inhibitory control during cognitive processing of information and intelligent decision-making.
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