Acquisition of predator knowledge from alarm calls via one-trial social learning in monkeys
Date
16/09/2022Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
How do animals learn to classify the world and what is the role of social learning during this process? Here, we show that young sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, of Taï Forest, Côte d’Ivoire, learn to rapidly classify an unfamiliar predator by attending to others’ alarm calls and that such knowledge is retained over long periods. We experimentally exposed subjects to chimeric predator models with both snake- and leopard-like features, combined with playbacks of conspecific snake (N=12) or leopard alarms (N=13). Adults classified the chimeras as non-threatening but for juveniles, we found that one single alarm call exposure was sufficient to allocate the chimera to the snake or leopard category, suggesting plausibility judgments in experienced adults. We then retested N=10 juveniles with the same models more than a year after their first experience and found that they continued to show their original response, indicating long-term retention of socially learned predator categorisation.
Citation
León , J , Thiriau , C , Bodin , C , Crockford , C & Zuberbühler , K 2022 , ' Acquisition of predator knowledge from alarm calls via one-trial social learning in monkeys ' , iScience , vol. 25 , no. 9 , 104853 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104853
Publication
iScience
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2589-0042Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Description
This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Agreement project grants 31003A_166458 (KZ) and 310030_185324 (KZ), and the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language, Swiss National Science Foundation Agreement #51NF40_180888 (KZ).Collections
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