Effects of negative stimuli on object permanence performance in baboons, Papio anubis, according to task complexity

Object permanence is a fundamental aspect of spatial cognition, referring to the ability to understand that objects continue to exist even when out of sight. This cognitive skill, essential for object tracking in daily activities, provides a relevant ecological framework for exploring how emotional states can affect cognitive performances across species with varying evolutionary histories. The transposition task, a common method for assessing object permanence, evaluates individuals' ability to track the movement of an object hidden under a container. While the complex relationship between emotion and cognition is extensively studied in a diversity of taxa, little is known about how emotion influences performance in object permanence tasks in primates. In this study, we investigated the effect of emotional distractors on the performance of four adult and captive olive baboons, Papio anubis , during a modified transposition task. The task involved a choice between two cups, one containing a food reward and the other containing either nothing (control condition), an identification medal (neutral condition) or plastic snakes/spiders (negative condition). Task difficulty was manipulated through five cups’ displacement patterns. We compared the success rates (i.e. tracking and pointing toward the cup containing the reward) across those three conditions. Our results suggest that the presence of a negative distractor influenced baboon performance in various ways, depending on the difficulty of the task. This research underscores that factors such as task difficulty are essential in interpreting how emotion interacts with cognitive performance, and that the lack of consideration of such factors may, in part, explain conflicting results across experimental studies. • Transposition task is a cognitive task assessing object permanence ability. • We tested the influence of emotional distractors in this task with baboons. • Negative distractors influenced baboons' performance. • This influence was modulated by the level of difficulty. • Factors like task difficulty are key in studies on emotion-cognition relationship.