Like humans, chimpanzees often perform tasks differently when they are being watched by a crowd of people.

Human activity – be it artistic, academic, social or otherwise – often influences by the size of the crowd around them. But we’re not the only species that adapts to audiences. According to recent research, some of our closest animal relatives show similar crowd-induced performance enhancements and crowd-size limitations. New evidence indicates that these innate psychological influences arose long before the evolution of human cultures that valued reputation and authority.

It is already well known that chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchical societies, but experts have previously disagreed about how much their peers can influence their emotions, actions and performance. But according to a study published November 8 in the journal, iScienceMoreover, even chimpanzees appear susceptible to the “audience effect” in certain social situations.

(Connected: Chimpanzee conversations can devolve into human-like chaos.)

To evaluate how this effect plays out in chimpanzees, researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University relied on the comparatively unique environment of their research center. There, chimpanzees interact with humans almost daily, using touch screens and experimenting with food rewards. The team therefore presented six chimpanzees with three different number tasks on a touch screen that varied in difficulty and cognitive demands.

In the first task, the chimpanzees had to press numbers from 1 to 19 sequentially after they appeared on the screen in adjacent order. The second game again required the animals to select numbers in order, but only after the numbers were displayed in different places on the screen. In the third task, the most difficult, the chimpanzees were asked to once again choose numbers in order. This time, however, all other numbers will disappear when the primates press one number, requiring them to quickly memorize positions in real time. The researchers then analyzed each primate’s performance data, collected from thousands of sessions over six years of testing.

Analysis of the data revealed two specific trends. The chimpanzees’ average performance improved by a “statistically significant” amount when performing the most difficult task in tandem with an increasing number of fellow experimenters. But when performing the simplest task, the animals performed worse if they knew that other chimpanzees or familiar people were standing nearby.

“Our results suggest that the extent to which people care about witnesses and spectators may not be so specific to our species,” Shinya Yamamoto, a co-author of the study at Japan’s Kyoto University, said in a statement Friday. “…(If) chimpanzees also pay special attention to audience members while performing their tasks, then it makes sense that these audience-based characteristics may have evolved before reputation-based societies emerged in our great ape lineage.”

Study co-author Kristen Lin added that while chimpanzees wouldn’t be expected to care whether another species was watching them perform a task, “the fact that they seem to be influenced by a human audience, even depending on the difficulty of the task, suggests that this connection turned out to be more complex than we initially expected.”

The team noted that they are still not sure what neurological mechanisms cause these behavioral changes in both primates and humans. However, they hope that further research into our primate relatives will one day help better explain this shared cross-species experience.