Can great apes imagine cocktails?

Affective forecasting - predicting the emotional experience of something that is yet to happen - is ubiquitously involved in our daily lives. Although hypothesised to be uniquely human, our team found potential evidence of this ability in an orang-utan, employing a novel method that relied on gustatory stimuli.. This project is aimed at consolidating such preliminary evidence.

Affective forecasting - predicting the emotional experience of something that is yet to happen - is ubiquitously involved in our daily lives. When facing novel situations, we can quickly integrate bits and pieces of prior experiences to imagine possible scenarios and their outcomes and, especially, what these might feel like. Such imagination-triggered emotions steer the decisions we make. Affective forecasting is hypothesized to be a uniquely human ability. In this project, employing a novel method, we conduct studies with chimpanzees and orang-utans to follow-up on and extend our preliminary findings of the presence of affective forecasting in an orang-utan (Sauciuc, Persson, Bååth, Brobowicz, Osvath, accepted). We will further explore representational abilities that enable affective forecasting. The studies will be conducted at Lund University Primate Research Station Furuvik.