When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers reporting in iScience on November 8 have found that chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them.

The findings suggest that this "audience effect" predates the development of reputation-based human societies, the researchers say.

"It was very surprising to find that chimpanzees are affected in their task performance by audience members, and by human audience members nonetheless," says Christen Lin of Kyoto University in Japan.

"One might not expect a chimp to particularly care if another species is watching them perform a task, but the fact that they seem to be affected by human audiences even depending on the difficulty of the task suggests that this relationship is more complex than we would have initially expected."