Emergence of Symmetry in a Visual Conditional Discrimination by Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes)

In Exp. 1, three young chimpanzees were trained to match red to a cross and green to a circle in an arbitrary matching-to-sample task. After acquisition of this task, they were tested for the emergence of associative symmetry of these conditional relations using the trials on which shapes were presented as samples and colors as comparisons. One of the three chimpanzees showed statistically significant accuracy on these test trials. This successful subject served in Exp. 2, in which an auditory-visual stimulus appeared contingent upon red and a cross while another auditory-visual stimulus was contingent upon green and a circle. This subject showed higher accuracies in symmetry tests than in Exp. 1, which suggested the facilitative effects of these events common to sample and correct comparison on the development of symmetry. In Exp. 3, subsequent tests in which only these stimuli were presented as samples indicated that these stimuli might have become the members of equivalence classes.