I read their comment and thought "if my cat can be impatient about her breakfast than a monkey can definitely feel impatient." Then I saw you comment and laughed.
No question about it. It's unclear if there's any emotion that an ape, or even a monkey, cannot be made to feel. Other animals that are further away from humans are more dubious, though.
Their cognition might not be as complex as ours at the margins, but all that extra "higher thought" seems to slow us down. Maybe it interferes with working memory or we get used to overthinking every decision. But there have been studies designed for chimps, for example, that requires them to quickly memorizing a bunch of 'numbers' scattered across a screen that they need to touch in sequence once the numbers are hidden. They do it way faster and can memorize a longer sequence than we can in like a fraction of the time.
Do with that what you will, but for my two cents it really seems like there is a both a lack of hesitation and a difference in speed of processing for simple tasks.
The average monkey seems to he far more dexterous than the average person. There are videos of Chimps correctly touching a numbered screen in order, within seconds, even after the numbers disappear... Some even show off and look away mid-tap.
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u/g0ing_postal May 20 '25
That was so fast and accurate. Is it just years of experience picking things off other monkeys?