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Cognition is the ability to interpret and connect information that is perceived in the world and to then apply this personal knowledge adaptively to future situations and problems (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990). Importantly, this allows the animal to improve their fitness. All animals have to negotiate their environment to allow them to forage for food, avoid predation and find mates. Primates stand out among other taxa for their flexibility in how they deal with the world around them. They inhabit both complex physical and social worlds, which have each been posited as the major selective pressures driving the advancement of primate brain size and, by extension, their cognitive abilities (Byrne, 2000; Reader et al., 2011); accordingly we first describe their understanding of their physical environment and then go on to discuss social cognition.
Primate Cognition about the Physical World
Cognitive mapping
Memory and future planning
Tool-use behavior and causal understanding
Social Cognition
Cooperation and prosocial behaviour
While cooperation is common, prosocial behaviour is more rare. There is little evidence in apes that individuals change their behaviour to bring a partner food (e.g. Silk et al., 2005; but see Horner et al., 2011), although several monkey species do so (e.g. de Waal et al., 2008; Burkart et al., 2007; Massen et al., 2010), even in cases in which being prosocial actually results in inequity towards the provider (Brosnan et al., 2010). On the other hand, even among chimpanzees, behaviours which help a partner are seen outside of the food context (e.g., helping; Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). One hypothesis is that prosocial behaviours are more common among cooperative breeders, due to the unique costs and benefits related to their interactions with each other (Blaffer-Hrdy, 2009), leading them to more actively share food with partners (Jaeggi et al., 2010).
Machiavellian and social Intelligence
Social learning
There is clearly a marked difference, however, between human culture and the behavioural traditions of primates, and what underlies this contrast is currently a topic of much debate. Cumulative culture has been proposed to describe the underlying mechanism that has allowed for the development of our complex technologies. Without the ability for imitation or teaching, researchers argue, primates may not be capable of cumulative learning because the complex information required for such intricate behaviours cannot be transmitted faithfully (Dean et al., 2014; Tomasello, 1999). Experimental studies with humans, however, reveal that teaching and imitation are not prerequisite for cumulative culture (Caldwell & Millen, 2009; Caldwell et al., 2012). Given this, along with the mounting evidence that primates are able to copy even complex tool-use behaviours from observing others (Price et al., 2009), what can explain the relative paucity of the cultural worlds of our closest-living relatives, especially for the chimpanzee? It may well be that the very ability of chimpanzees to copy others leads to their limited ability to build on the knowledge of previous generations. After learning a specific method from observations of others, chimpanzees appear to become entrenched and unable to transition to a new behaviour, even if the introduced method is more efficient (Hopper et al., 2011). Although seemingly a limitation of their learning capacities, such as conformity and conservatism may enable chimpanzees to maintain strong social bonds and potentially avoid risks in the wild. Thus, the key ability here is not just in copying others, but determining when to do so (Rendell et al., 2011).
Conclusions
Glossary
cognitive mapping: "The representation embodied in a cognitive map is typically assumed to encode distances and directions and to enable mental operations of them" (Shettleworth, 1998, p.296) allowing animals to calculate the optimum routes from point A to point B.
conservatism: Mastery of a skill inhibits further exploration to new alternative options or behavioural strategies which may be more efficient
cooperation: Two or more individuals increase their direct fitness more by working together than individually (Brosnan, Salwiczek & Bshary, 2010).
cooperative breeders: Social system in which young are cared for by both parents and, often, their mature offspring.
cumulative culture: The process by which generations build upon the knowledge of previous ones creating increasingly complex artefacts and technologies through the accumulation of design — the so-called "ratchet effect" (Tomasello, 1999).
deception: The provisioning of false information which affects another individual's behaviour in favour of the deceiver. While this may occur without intention on the part of the deceiver, resulting in functional, or tactical, deception, individuals may also do so intentionally.
fission-fusion: In which a group of individuals breaks ups and reforms over the course of a day or week meaning that each party size represents a subset of total group size.
fitness: The ability to survive and successfully reproduce (e.g., evolutionary fitness)
home range: The territory which a primate, or group of primates, occupies. Note, primates move about their territory but may only travel within small subsections each day. Furthermore, the degree to which a primates' home range overlaps with conspecifics and different primate species is affected not just by the specific primate but also by environmental and space pressures (e.g., food availability and deforestation).
imitation: Copying the exact behaviours demonstrated by another. Compare with ‘emulation' in which an individual merely replicates the goal or end-state of a novel behaviour performed by others.
inequity: A situation in which unequal rewards are received. The behavioural response studied is ‘inequity aversion' vis-à-vis a sense of unfairness (see Brosnan, 2006, for further discussion).
prosocial behaviour: Behaviour which results in a benefit to another individual.
teaching: "An individual actor A can be said to teach if it modifies its behaviour only in the presence of a naive observer, B, at some cost or at least without obtaining an immediate benefit for itself. A's behaviour thereby encourages or punishes B's behaviour, or provides B with experience, or sets an example for B. As a result, B acquires knowledge or learns a skills earlier in life or more rapidly or efficiently than it might otherwise do, or that it would not learn at all" (Caro & Hauser, 1992, p. 153).
theory of mind: The attribution of mental states such as beliefs, thoughts, desires and intentions to oneself and others. See Heyes (1998) for a detailed discussion about primate understanding of theory of mind.
traditions: "enduring behaviour patterns shared among members of a group that depend to a measurable degree on social contributions to individual learning, resulting in shared practices among members of a group" (Fragaszy & Perry, 2003, p.3)
working memory: The short-term retention of information which may sometimes incorporate elements of information processing.
References and Recommended Reading
Recommended Reading:
Byrne, R. W. The Thinking Ape: The Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (1995).
de Waal, F. B. M. & Ferrari, P. F. The Primate Mind: Built to Connect with Other Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2012).
Maestripieri, D. Primate Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (2005).
Tomasello, M. & Call, J. Primate Cognition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (1997).
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