Conservatism and "copy-if-better" in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
Abstract
Social learning is predicted to evolve in socially living animals provided the learning process is not random but biased by certain socio-ecological factors. One bias of particular interest for the emergence of (cumulative) culture is the tendency to forgo personal behaviour in favour of relatively better variants observed in others, also known as the "copy-if-better" strategy. We investigated whether chimpanzees employ copy-if-better in a simple token-exchange paradigm controlling for individual and random social learning. After being trained on one token-type, subjects were confronted with a conspecific demonstrator who either received the same food reward as the subject (control condition) or a higher value food reward than the subject (test condition) for exchanging another token-type. In general, the chimpanzees persisted in exchanging the token-type they were trained on individually, indicating a form of conservatism consistent with previous studies. However, the chimpanzees were more inclined to copy the demonstrator in the test compared to the control condition, indicating a tendency to employ a copy-if-better strategy. We discuss our findings in light of their relevance to the emergence of cumulative culture.
Citation
van Leeuwen , E J C & Call , J 2017 , ' Conservatism and "copy-if-better" in chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) ' , Animal Cognition , vol. 20 , no. 3 , pp. 575-579 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1061-7
Publication
Animal Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1435-9448Type
Journal article
Description
This work was funded by the project SOMICS, ERC-Synergy grant # 609819 to Josep Call.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.