A capuchin monkey (Cebus apella) uses video to find food

We examined the ability of capuchin monkeys to use video without immediate visual-kinaesthetic feed-back as a source of information to guide their action in the 3D world. In Experiment 1 two capuchins learned to retrieve food under one of two different objects in one cage after watching the experimenter hiding food under one of two replica objects while in another cage. Information space and retrieval space were thus separate. Performance criterion was 71% first correct choices in blocks of 24 trials. However, when the subjects watched pre-recorded videos of the hiding events they chose randomly. In Experiment 2 we gave the capuchins further trials with video and we enhanced the object shapes by line drawings. One capuchin eventually learned to use the video-clips to locate food and he generalized this learning to two new objects.