Coordination of Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in a Stag Hunt Game

Abstract

Group-living animals frequently face situations in which they must coordinate individual and sometimes conflicting goals. We assessed chimpanzees' ability to coordinate in a Stag Hunt game. Dyads were confronted with a situation in which each individual was already foraging on a low-value food (hare) when a highvalue food (stag) appeared that required collaboration for retrieval, with a solo attempt to get the stag resulting in a loss of both options. In one condition visibility between partners was open whereas in the other it was blocked by a barrier. Regardless of condition, dyads almost always (91%) coordinated to choose the higher valued collaborative option. Intentional communication or monitoring of the partner's behavior before decision making-characteristic of much human coordination-were limited. Instead, all dyads adopted a leader-follower strategy in which one partner took the risk of going first, presumably predicting that this would induce the other to join in (sometimes communicating if she was slow to do so). These results show that humans' closest primate relatives do not use complex communication to coordinate but most often use a less cognitively complex strategy that achieves the same end.

Chimpanzees, bonobos and children successfully coordinate in conflict situations

“…Perhaps an aversion to either risk or even competition with their partners led them to select lower value (but secure) rewards in those cases. In the absence of risk, chimpanzees prefer to act alone rather than to collaborate provided both actions yield the same rewards [34], but they switch to collaborative options that result in better outcomes than acting alone [34,36]. However, if social risks increase, as in this study or other tasks [20], they may prefer lower but more secure rewards, thus managing a trade-off between competition and reward maximization.…”

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

“…One of the main challenges in this field is extending these studies to direct real-time interactions that would entail a broad spectrum of dynamic competitive and cooperative behaviours. In line with this, several recent studies also considered direct social interactions in humans and non-human primates [3][4][5][50][51][52][53][54][55] during dyadic games where players can monitor actions and outcomes of each other. Transparent games allow modelling the players' access to social cues, which is essential for the analysis of experimental data in the studies of this kind [21].…”

“…Transparent games allow modelling the players' access to social cues, which is essential for the analysis of experimental data in the studies of this kind [21]. This might be especially useful when behaviour is explicitly compared between "simultaneous" and "transparent" game settings, as in [3,5,50,55]. In particular, the enhanced cooperation in the transparent iBoS for high p see provides a theoretical explanation for the empirical observations in [5], where humans playing an iBoS-type game demonstrated a higher level of cooperation and a fairer payoff distribution when they were able to observe the actions of the partner while making their own choice.…”

Corepresentation During Joint Action in Marmoset Monkeys (Callithrix jacchus)

“…The gaze pattern in marmoset monkeys, however, may suggest the working hypothesis that, like humans (Tomasello, Hare, Lehmann, & Call, 2007;Wyman et al, 2013) but unlike great apes (Bullinger, Wyman, Melis, & Tomasello, 2011;Duguid et al, 2014), marmosets may use mutual gaze to coordinate their behaviors. Such a propensity to pay close attention to a cooperation partner and its attention could have evolved in marmosets to support the routine coordination of behavior in space and time in their daily lives, in particular during infant transfers (Snowdon, 2001).…”