Social complexity predicts transitive reasoning in prosimian primates (original) (raw)
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Animal Behaviour, 2011
Many haplorhine primates flexibly exploit social cues when competing for food. Whether strepsirrhine primates possess similar abilities is unknown. To explore the phylogenetic origins of such skills among primates, we tested ringtailed lemurs, Lemur catta, for their ability to exploit social cues while competing for food. We found that in two contexts ringtailed lemurs spontaneously approached food out of their competitor's view. To assess whether these skills are related to the relatively complex social structure seen in ringtailed lemurs or shared more broadly across a range of strepsirrhines, we then compared ringtailed lemurs to three lemur species with less complex societies in the same food competition task (N ¼ 50 lemurs). Although all species skilfully avoided food proximate to a competitor in a pretest, only ringtailed lemurs performed above chance in the food competition task that required subjects to avoid food that an experimenter was facing in favour of one that he was not facing. We also compared all four species in a noncompetitive gaze-following task. Ringtailed lemurs were again the only species that looked up more frequently when an experimenter gazed into space than when an experimenter gazed forward (although at relatively low frequencies). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that ringtailed lemurs have undergone convergent social-cognitive evolution with haplorhines, possibly as an adaptation for living in the largest and most complex social groups among strepsirrhines. Results are discussed in terms of lemur cognitive evolution as well as the social intelligence hypothesis. Ó
Social complexity and transitive inference in corvids
Animal Behaviour, 2003
The social complexity hypothesis asserts that animals living in large social groups should display enhanced cognitive abilities along predictable dimensions. To test this concept, we compared highly social pinyon jays, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus, with relatively nonsocial western scrub-jays, Aphelocoma californica, on two complex cognitive tasks relevant to the ability to track and assess social relationships. Pinyon jays learned to track multiple dyadic relationships more rapidly and more accurately than scrub-jays and appeared to display a more robust and accurate mechanism of transitive inference. These results provide a clear demonstration of the association between social complexity and cognition in animals.
Transitive reasoning in animals
(Mente y Cerebro/Investigación y Ciencia - Scientific American ISSN 1695-0887, 2006
Comparative studies on the cognitive capacities of social animals can help us understand the origin and evolution of complex mental processes in humans.
Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2015
Transitive inference (TI) is the ability to infer social relationships between individuals (e.g., if A < B and B < C, then A < C), and has been documented in a variety of vertebrates. Many studies of TI use the task of inferring social dominance, where a subject animal A first directly interacts with B (e.g., A subordinate to B: A < B), and then indirectly observes the interaction of B and an unknown C (B < C), using both direct and indirect information to infer its own relationship with C (i.e., A < C). However, order effects are known to influence learning, especially in complex scenarios, and we have little understanding of the effects of presentation order in transitive inference. Here we show that the cichlid Julidochromis transcriptus can use TI to correctly assess social relationships when information is presented in the order opposite to that most commonly employed in studies of TI. We find that focal individuals (A) can transitively infer their relationships with an unknown individual (C) when initially given indirect experience (i.e., eavesdropping that B < C) and then given direct experience (A < B). We conclude that J. transcriptus can infer social relationships when experiencing first indirect and then direct social information. We suggest that in this and many other species, transitive inference may occur in either presentation order, and future studies of TI should account for order effects of social information.
Transitive inference in non-human animals: An empirical and theoretical analysis
Transitive inference has long been considered one of the hallmarks of human deductive reasoning. Recent reports of transitive-like behaviors in non-human animals have prompted a flourishing empirical and theoretical search for the mechanism(s) that may mediate this ability in non-humans. In this paper, I begin by describing the transitive inference tasks customarily used with non-human animals and then review the empirical findings. Transitive inference has been demonstrated in a wide variety of species, and the signature effects that usually accompany transitive inference in humans (the serial position effect and the symbolic distance effect) have also been found in non-humans. I then critically analyze the most prominent models of this ability in non-human animals. Some models are cognitive, proposing for instance that animals use the rules of formal logic or form mental representations of the premises to solve the task, others are based on associative mechanisms such as value transfer and reinforcement and non-reinforcement. Overall, I argue that the reinforcement-based models are in a much better empirical and theoretical position. Hence, transitive inference in non-human animals should be considered a property of reinforcement history rather than of inferential processes. I finalize by shedding some light on some promising lines of research.
Heuristics facilitates the evolution of transitive inference and social hierarchy in a large group
arXiv: Computer Science and Game Theory, 2021
Transitive inference (TI) refers to social cognition that facilitates the discernment of unknown relationships between individuals using known relationships. It is extensively reported that TI evolves in animals living in a large group because TI could assess relative rank without deducing all dyadic relationships, which averts costly fights. The relationships in a large group become so complex that social cognition may not be developed adequately to handle such complexity. If all group members apply TI to all possible members in the group, TI is supposed to require extremely highly developed cognitive abilities especially in a large group. Instead of developing cognitive abilities significantly, animals may apply simplified TI we call reference TI in this study as heuristic approaches. The reference TI allows members to recognize and remember social interactions only among a set of reference members rather than all potential members. Our study assumes that information processes in the reference TI comprises 1) the number of reference members based on which individuals infer transitively, 2) the number of reference members shared by the same strategists, and 3) memory capacity. We examined how information processes evolve in a large group using evolutionary simulations in the hawk-dove game. Information processes with almost any numbers of reference members could evolve in a large group as long as the numbers of shared reference member are high because information from the others' experiences is shared. TI dominates immediate inference, which assesses relative rank on direct interactions, because TI could establish social hierarchy more rapidly applying information from others' experiences.
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2018
The years since the publication of Machiavellian Intelligence have witnessed a Golden Age in discoveries concerning social cognition in human and non-human primates and many other animal taxa too. Here I briefly dissect some of the variants of the social intelligence hypotheses that have evolved in this time and offer a selective overview of scientific discoveries in this field, particularly in primates, over the last 30 years.
Researchers have rigorously investigated the cognitive capacities of various nonhuman primate species in an attempt to elucidate the factors that define human uniqueness and that are responsible for the emergence of these traits. It is proposed that humans can be distinguished from other primates by their heightened capacity for abstraction, which permits reasoning about unobservable social and physical forces and prompts the capacity to seek causal explanations for events. It is suggested that these capacities arose as a result of the distinctly cooperative and communicative societies that humans occupy as well as the need to outcompete more physically formidable species .