Chimpanzees hunt for fruit in video game to test navigation skills

Chimpanzees in a zoo have been trained to use a touchscreen to navigate a virtual environment and seek out objects. Studies like this could help us learn more about how our close relatives find their way around in the jungle. "There's a lot of research on the navigation of birds and bees," says Matthias Allritz at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "But we know very little about the navigation of most primate species." This is largely because chimpanzees are difficult to track in the wild, Allritz says.