Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration
Abstract
The limited evidence of complex culture in non-human primates contrasts strikingly with human behaviour. This may be because non-human primates fail to use information acquired socially as effectively as they use information acquired individually. Here, monkeys were trained on a stimulus discrimination task with a win-stay, lose-shift (WSLS) reward structure. In a social learning condition, the experimenter performed an information trial by choosing between the available stimuli; in an individual condition, monkeys made this choice themselves. The monkeys' subsequent test trials displayed the same stimulus array. They were rewarded for repetition of rewarded ('win-stay') and avoidance of unrewarded ('lose-shift') information trial selections. Nine monkeys reached our pre-determined performance criterion on the initial two-stimulus stage. Their ability to generalise the WSLS strategy was then evaluated by transfer to a three-stimulus stage. Minimal differences were found in information use between the social and individual conditions on two-stimuli. However, a bias was found towards repetition of the information trial, regardless of information source condition or whether the information trial selection was rewarded. Proficient subjects were found to generalise the strategy to three-stimuli following rewarded information trials, but performed at chance on unrewarded. Again, this was not found to vary by source condition. Overall, results suggest no fundamental barrier to non-human primates' use of information from a social source. However, the apparent struggle to learn from the absence of rewards hints at a difficulty with using information acquired from unsuccessful attempts; this could be linked to the limited evidence for cumulative culture in non-human primates.
Citation
Kean , D , Renner , E , Atkinson , M & Caldwell , C A 2022 , ' Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration ' , Animal Cognition , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-022-01654-0
Publication
Animal Cognition
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1435-9448Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
This project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 648841 RATCHETCOG ERC-2014-CoG. DK was supported by a PhD studentship funded by the ERC and University of Stirling Department of Psychology. Edinburgh Zoo’s Living Links Research Facility is core supported by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (Registered charity number: SC004064) through funding generated by its visitors, members and supporters, and by the University of St Andrews (Registered charity number: SC013532) who core supports the maintenance and management costs of the research facility.Collections
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