New research led by Prof William Hopkins of Georgia State University and Emory University has found that some cognitive abilities in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) depend on the genes they inherit.

Previous studies have shown that human intelligence is inherited through genes, but social and environmental factors, such as formal education and socioeconomic status, also play a role and are somewhat confounded with genetic factors. Chimpanzees do not have these additional socio-cultural influences.

“Chimpanzees offer a really simple way of thinking about how genes might influence intelligence without, in essence, the baggage of these other mechanisms that are confounded with genes in research on human intelligence,” said Prof Hopkins, who is the lead author of a paper appearing in the journal Current Biology.

Prof Hopkins and his colleagues at Georgia State University used quantitative genetics analysis to link the degree of relatedness between the chimpanzees to their similarities or differences in performance on the various cognitive measures to determine whether cognitive performance is inherited in chimpanzees.

They involved 99 chimpanzees (9 to 54 years old), who completed 13 cognitive tasks designed to test a variety of abilities.

Genes were found to play a role in overall cognitive abilities, as well as the performance on tasks in several categories.

The scientists also studied the structure of intelligence in chimpanzees to determine whether there were any similarities to the structure of human intelligence.

“We wanted to see if we gave a sample of chimpanzees a large array of tasks, would we find essentially some organization in their abilities that made sense. The bottom line is that chimp intelligence looks somewhat like the structure of human intelligence,” Prof Hopkins said.

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William D. Hopkins et al. Chimpanzee Intelligence Is Heritable. Current Biology, published online July 10, 2014; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.076