Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem

Harrison, Rachel A.; Leeuwen, Edwin J. C. van; Whiten, Andrew

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.102033

Cited by 13 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Here, we refer to this idea as the social curiosity hypothesis . Findings from captivity show social facilitation effects on chimpanzee's reactions to new food (Forss et al, 2019; Gustafsson et al, 2016) and suggest that more socially tolerant chimpanzee groups are also better at producing new innovations (Harrison et al, 2021). Thus, if relying on social information is a pathway for apes to reduce the risks involved in being curious, we expect the levels of intrinsic curiosity to be higher in less social species, where individuals more frequently must rely on their own motivation to search new information, compared to highly social species were the predisposition to attend to social cue should be stronger.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The curious case of great ape curiosity and how it is shaped by sociality

Forss

Willems

2022

Ethology

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Although curiosity has huge implications for human creativity and learning, its evolutionary roots and function in animals remain poorly understood. Modern humans, who lack natural predators, thrive with curiosity, but our ancestors faced more hazardous environments that would not necessarily favor individual curiosity. Instead, being curious may have undergone selection in interaction with sociality. Our closest living relatives, the great apes (henceforth apes) have evolved facing conditions more like human ancestors and as such, can help us understand the functions of curiosity and its expression in non-human species. In this study, we defined curiosity as a combination of behavioral traits like neophilia, exploration diversity, and prolonged interest in exploring novelty and compared it, under similar captive environments across four ape species (N = 101): Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus, Pongo abelii, and Pongo pygmaeus. Results revealed that curiosity followed a linear gradient across the four species in accordance with their sociality. We propose the social curiosity hypothesis to explain the observed pattern, reflecting those individuals in highly social species, like bonobos and chimpanzees, regularly are accompanied by conspecifics, and thereby accustomed to an abundance of social cues, leading to inhibited curiosity when alone, compared to more solitary orangutans. As such, our study implies that ape curiosity evolved interlinked with sociality. Further, a subset of the sample (N = 46) enabled us to examine if curiosity benefits problem-solving skills, but our data did not support such link.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The curious case of great ape curiosity and how it is shaped by sociality

Forss

Willems

2022

Ethology

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“…The third and final finding we highlighted was that greater tolerance in a small group of chimpanzees was associated with greater success in a challenging tool use task, including the generation of a more diverse set of potential technological solutions [ 34 ]. Thus as in the juice and LBT study we summarized, the collective aspects are twofold; tolerance may enhance the generation of the raw material (inventions) for potential cultural adoption or cumulative culture, and also the prospects for others adopting these through social learning.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We may also question whether they discriminate effects of the degree of social tolerance from the effects of opportunities for observational learning per se, such as those resulting from variations in party size. In a recent study [ 34 ], we were able to minimize such concerns by comparing two small communities of chimpanzees in adjacent enclosures in an African sanctuary, additionally applying newly developed and rigorous direct measures of social tolerance, independently of party size [ 72 ].…”

Section: Social Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

Whiten

Harrison

McGuigan

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Social learning in non-human primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until the present century this was limited to what one individual learns from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild then highlighted the collective context for social learning, and broader ‘diffusion experiments’ have since demonstrated transmission at the community level. In the present article, we describe and set in comparative perspective three strands of our recent research that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. First, exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals' discoveries, spreading to become shared innovations. The second series of experiments yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others but implicating a form of quorum decision-making. Third, we found that between-group differences in social tolerance were associated with differential success in developing more complex tool use to exploit an increasingly inaccessible resource. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the wider context of related studies of humans, other primates and non-primate species. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

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“…www.nature.com/scientificreports/ Firstly, tub-stacking represents a rare case of spontaneous multi-material tool construction (combination of more than one material to create a useful object 59 ) in a non-human ape. Captive chimpanzees and orangutans have also both been found to use sticks to push down and then 'fish out' sponge materials to access juice rewards 60,61 , but these behaviours were heavily scaffolded under experimental conditions. The authors also frame these behaviours as 'sequential' tool-use, where separate materials are used one after another, rather than compound tools, where multiple materials are combined into a single object.…”

Section: Innovative Materials Use In Communicative Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovative multi-material tool use in the pant-hoot display of a chimpanzee

Watson

Lambeth

Schapiro

2022

Sci Rep

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Abstract‘Pant-hoot displays’ are a species-typical, multi-modal communicative behaviour in chimpanzees in which pant-hoot vocalisations are combined with varied behavioural displays. In both captivity and the wild, individuals commonly incorporate striking or throwing elements of their environment into these displays. In this case study, we present five videos of an unenculturated, captive, adult male chimpanzee combining a large rubber feeding tub with excelsior (wood wool) in a multi-step process, which was then integrated into the subject’s pant-hoot displays as a percussive tool or ‘instrument’. During the construction process, the subject demonstrated an understanding of the relevant properties of these materials, ‘repairing’ the tub to be a more functional drum when necessary. We supplement these videos with a survey of care staff from the study site for additional detail and context. Although care must be taken in generalising data from a single individual, the behaviour reported here hints at three intriguing features of chimpanzee communicative cognition: (1) it suggests a degree of voluntary control over vocal production, (2) it is a so-far unique example of compound tool innovation and use in communicative behaviour and (3) it may represent an example of forward planning in communicative behaviour. Each of these would represent hitherto undocumented dimensions of flexibility in chimpanzee communication, mapping fertile ground for future research.

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Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem

Cited by 13 publications

References 79 publications

The curious case of great ape curiosity and how it is shaped by sociality

The curious case of great ape curiosity and how it is shaped by sociality

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

Innovative multi-material tool use in the pant-hoot display of a chimpanzee

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