Ultimate and proximate mechanisms of reciprocal altruism in rats

Dolivo, Vassilissa; Rutte, Claudia; Taborsky, Michael

doi:10.3758/s13420-016-0236-z

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…This increased pulling propensity of hungry rats cannot be explained by a mislead expectation to obtain food for themselves, because rats pulling with the same hunger state showed reduced pulling rates when pulling the platform towards an empty cage. Hence, their increased pulling rate for a partner when being hungry reflects neither a self-directed immediate feeding demand nor an undirected change in motivation (Dolivo, Rutte, & Taborsky, 2016). All rats participating in the experiment had experienced this variant of the iterated Prisoner's dilemma paradigm before.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) communicate need, which elicits donation of food.

Schweinfurth

Taborsky

2018

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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Reciprocal cooperation has been observed in a wide range of taxa, but the proximate mechanisms underlying the exchange of help are yet unclear. Norway rats reciprocate help received from partners in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. For donors, this involves accepting own costs to the benefit of a partner, without obtaining immediate benefits in return. We studied whether such altruistic acts are conditional on the communication of the recipient's need. Our results show that in a 2-player mutual food-provisioning task, prospective recipients show a behavioral cascade reflecting increasing intensity. First, prospective receivers reach out for the food themselves, then they emit ultrasonic calls toward their partner, before finally showing noisy attention-grabbing behaviors. Food-deprived individuals communicate need more intensively than satiated ones. In return, donors provide help corresponding to the intensity of the recipients' communication. This indicates that rats communicate their need, which changes the helping propensity of potential donors. Communication of need and corresponding adjustment of cooperation may be a widespread proximate mechanism explaining the mutual exchange of services between animals. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) communicate need, which elicits donation of food.

Schweinfurth

Taborsky

2018

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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“…Like rats4647, dogs seem to understand the need of a partner to make them act cooperatively (see also ref. 33).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity

Gfrerer

Taborsky

2017

Sci Rep

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Cooperation by generalised reciprocity implies that individuals apply the decision rule “help anyone if helped by someone”. This mechanism has been shown to generate evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation, but as yet it is unclear how widely this cooperation mechanism is applied among animals. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are highly social animals with considerable cognitive potential and the ability to differentiate between individual social partners. But although dogs can solve complex problems, they may use simple rules for behavioural decisions. Here we show that dogs trained in an instrumental cooperative task to provide food to a social partner help conspecifics more often after receiving help from a dog before. Remarkably, in so doing they show no distinction between partners that had helped them before and completely unfamiliar conspecifics. Apparently, dogs use the simple decision rule characterizing generalised reciprocity, although they are probably capable of using the more complex decision rule of direct reciprocity: “help someone who has helped you”. However, generalized reciprocity involves lower information processing costs and is therefore a cheaper cooperation strategy. Our results imply that generalised reciprocity might be applied more commonly than direct reciprocity also in other mutually cooperating animals.

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“…Moreover, it was also argued that the change in leading-following states over trials is in line with the mutually beneficial exchange between a cooperator and a reciprocating partner [39], which is a form of direct reciprocity–a basic form of reciprocal cooperation [[35]. Indeed, recent laboratory studies demonstrated that wild rats display a generalized reciprocity that does not depend on the identity of the recipient [8], a direct reciprocity in which the partners are familiar [9, 11, 14], and that they help the more hungry recipients or those in poor condition [10]. Other studies have demonstrated reciprocity in laboratory rats, suggesting that the mechanism for this reciprocity is a display of food-seeking behavior [40], and that prosocial behavior in rats occurs even in the absence of strategic, reciprocal, or selfish motivations [38].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rats do not eat alone in public: Food-deprived rats socialize rather than competing for baits

et al. 2017

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Limited resources result in competition among social animals. Nevertheless, social animals also have innate preferences for cooperative behavior. In the present study, 12 dyads of food-deprived rats were tested in four successive trials, and then re-tested as eight triads of food-deprived rats that were unfamiliar to each other. We found that the food-deprived dyads or triads of rats did not compete for the food available to them at regular spatially-marked locations that they had previously learnt. Rather, these rats traveled together to collect the baits. One rat, or two rats in some triads, lead (ran ahead) to collect most of the baits, but "leaders" differed across trials so that, on average, each rat ultimately collected similar amounts of baits. Regardless of which rat collected the baits, the rats traveled together with no substantial difference among them in terms of their total activity. We suggest that rats, which are a social species that has been found to display reciprocity, have evolved to travel and forage together and to share limited resources. Consequently, they displayed a sort of 'peace economy' that on average resulted in equal access to the baits across trials. For social animals, this type of dynamics is more relaxed, tolerant, and effective in the management of conflicts. Rather than competing for the limited available food, the food-deprived rats socialized and coexisted peacefully.

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Ultimate and proximate mechanisms of reciprocal altruism in rats

Cited by 24 publications

References 35 publications

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) communicate need, which elicits donation of food.

Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) communicate need, which elicits donation of food.

Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity

Rats do not eat alone in public: Food-deprived rats socialize rather than competing for baits

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