Positive emotional experiences may trigger spontaneous prospective memory retrievals in foraging chimpanzees

An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Félix Houphouët Boigny University in Abidjan, Ivory Coast were the first to study which specific information from previous feeding visits wild chimpanzees take into account when they revisit the same fruit trees. To this end the researchers followed five female chimpanzees from Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, for extended periods of time. They found that chimpanzees direct their travels from longer distances towards trees that carried the best fruit in the past. The study further suggests that these revisits are triggered by positive emotions experienced during previous visits.