Age-Related Changes in Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) Cognition: Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analyses

Chimpanzees are the species most closely related to humans yet age-related changes in brain and cognition remain poorly understood. The lack of studies on age-related changes in cognition in chimpanzees is particularly unfortunate in light of the recent evidence demonstrating that this species naturally develops Alzheimers disease (AD) neuropathology. Here, we tested 213 young, middle-aged, and elderly chimpanzees on the Primate Cognitive Test Battery (PCTB), a set of 13 tasks that assess physical and social cognition in nonhuman primates. A subset of these chimpanzees (n=146) were tested a second time on a portion of the PCTB tasks as a means of evaluating longitudinal changes in cognition. Cross-sectional analyses revealed a significant quadratic association between age and cognition with younger and older chimpanzees performing more poorly than middle-aged individuals. Longitudinal analyses showed that, while young chimpanzees performance improved from test 1 to test 2, middle-aged and elderly chimpanzees performance showed significant decline over time. The collective data show that chimpanzees, like other nonhuman primates, show age-related decline in cognition. Further investigations into whether the observed cognitive decline is associated with AD pathologies in chimpanzees would be invaluable in understanding the comparative biology of aging and neuropathology in primates.