jueves, 23 de agosto de 2007

How Chimps Avoid Temptation



Through some experiments, researchers have been able to demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable to distract their minds by playing with games, thus to avoid being tempted by some temptations, in exchange for themselves according to the time they passed avoiding them.
As we (humans) do certain actions in exchange for others (for example we save some money destinated to food and we spend it later on a cinema ticket, or we study all week so we can go out on weekend), researchers have demonstrated that this kind of congintive and conductual knowledge of self distraction was also present on primates.

"The experiment"

At first they put 4 chimpanzees under a stimulus, as well as it is a candy dispenser where they could eat as many candies as this container had. After this, chimpanzees had to wait for until the dispenser started to fill itself again, so as long as the wait was, bigger was the reward.
Then, the researchers introduced into the ambient some toys in the way that chimpanzees could wait the filling deposit time by playing. In this way they could distract themselves. This distraction technique was proved by showing to the primates how the deposit was getting fill but without getting the candies yet.
Results showed that chimpanzees spent more time playing with toys when they didn`t have any restriction related to get the candies from the dispenser than when they did have it.

By this way they demonstrated that playing with toys was a puntual strategy to control the impulse or temptation to eat the candies.


This study was researched in Georgia State University in Atlanta.

For more information visit the web site:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/822/2

lunes, 20 de agosto de 2007

... about "talking about.."

Well, there were some things i didn`t write on the first entry.
Answering to the questions about the web page, well actually one of the members of the staff has a title on computation, something like that (it`s quite bit longer the title name but i can`t remember it now) but he knows a lot about this `cause it`s on what he works.
i can say that the 80% or 90% of the staff members knows something about computers.
i represent the 10%-20% of the exception hehe.
And well, the page has already a year online, but we had first another one about two years ago but there we weren`t paying any server like we`re doing now (our page wasn`t .com but .tk). This acquire us certain independence.
And, as an Errata, yes, about the paragraph "but the fact that i already now the mentors of the page makes it special for me", i made a mistake, i ate the k letter, i should wrote "know" instead of "now".