Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) strategically manipulate their environment to deny conspecifics access to food

Humans modify their environment to grant or prevent others’ access to valuable resources, for example by using locks. We tested whether sanctuary-living chimpanzees (N=10) would flexibly modify their environment to either allow or deny a dominant conspecific access to a shared food source by giving them the option to change a food reward’s pathway prior to releasing it. The food could end up in one of two locations: one was accessible to both the subject and a dominant conspecific, the other one was only accessible to the subject. We further manipulated the extent of inhibitory control needed for modifying the pathway. Our subjects used the apparatus competitively to monopolize food but changed the pathway less often in trials with high inhibitory demands. We further show how inhibitory task demands in a social context influence chimpanzees’ future planning. Our results show that chimpanzees will strategically manipulate their environment to maximize their own and deny a dominant conspe..., , , # Data for Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) strategically manipulate their environment to deny conspecifics access to food

This dataset contains the test trial data from our behavioral study.

## Description of the data and file structure

The .csv file contains the dataset from the test trials used for our analyses. Each row corresponds to a trial. The spreadsheet contains the following variables:

Video: name of the video that was used for coding the behavior in the trial
Date: date of trial in MM/DD/YYYY format
Subject: Subject's name
Age: Subject's age in years
Sex: Subject's sex (female/male)
Session: The session the trial belongs to (1-4)
Randomization: randomization used for session (pseudo-randomized for determining and counter-balancing the order of trial types within session, 4 randomizations)
Reward: Reward type used for trial (peanuts/banana)
Conspecific: Name of the dominant conspecific paired with subject
Conspecific.side: Location (left vs. right adjacent room) the conspeci...