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Proportion correctly solved tubes in tube trap task. Sumatran individuals achieved significantly more correct tubes than Borneans (LM: N Sumatra = 14, N Borneo = 8, P species = 0.011, β species = 0.127 ± 0.045, P age = 0.123, P sex = 0.737).
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Cultural species can - or even prefer to - learn their skills from conspecifics. According to the cultural intelligence hypothesis, selection on underlying mechanisms not only improves this social learning ability but also the asocial (individual) learning ability. Thus, species with systematically richer opportunities to socially acquire knowledge...
Citations
... , birds (Beauchamp & Fern andez-Juricic, 2004;Kulahci et al., 2016;Langley et al., 2018b;Aplin et al., 2012;Boogert, Farine & Spencer, 2014;Morand-Ferron & Quinn, 2011;Lipkind et al., 2002;Ashton et al., 2018a;Speechley et al., 2024), fish (Fischer et al., 2015;Triki et al., 2019; Brandão, Braithwaite & Goncalves-de-Freitas, 2015;Stanbrook et al., 2020;Leris & Reader, 2016;Ausas et al., 2019), and invertebrates (Liedtke & Schneider, 2017;Kamhi et al., 2016;Ott & Rogers, 2010; Amador-Vargas et al., 2015;Seid & Junge, 2016). However, support for the SIH has not been consistent among or within taxa (Templeton, Kamil & Balda, 1999;Iwaniuk & Arnold, 2004;Kverkov a et al., 2018;Forss et al., 2016; Biological Reviews (2024) 000-000 © 2024 The Author(s). Biological Reviews published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Cambridge Philosophical Society. ...
The Social Intelligence Hypothesis (SIH) is one of the leading explanations for the evolution of cognition. Since its inception a vast body of literature investigating the predictions of the SIH has accumulated, using a variety of methodologies and species. However, the generalisability of the hypothesis remains unclear. To gain an understanding of the robustness of the SIH as an explanation for the evolution of cognition, we systematically searched the literature for studies investigating the predictions of the SIH. Accordingly, we compiled 103 studies with 584 effect sizes from 17 taxonomic orders. We present the results of four meta‐analyses which reveal support for the SIH across interspecific, intraspecific and developmental studies. However, effect sizes did not differ significantly between the cognitive or sociality metrics used, taxonomy or testing conditions. Thus, support for the SIH is similar across studies using neuroanatomy and cognitive performance, those using broad categories of sociality, group size and social interactions, across taxonomic groups, and for tests conducted in captivity or the wild. Overall, our meta‐analyses support the SIH as an evolutionary and developmental explanation for cognitive variation.
... 94 When housed under comparable conditions in zoos, where food availability is high and stable, Sumatran orangutans outperform their Bornean counterparts in problem-solving tasks. 92 These differences in cognitive performance despite similar developmental and immediate conditions suggest that the differences in individual and social learning abilities between Sumatran and Bornean orangutans are at least to some degree genetically fixed (evolutionary version of the cultural intelligence hypothesis). ...
Humans’ colonization of diverse habitats relied on our ancestors' abilities to innovate and share innovations with others. While ecological impacts on innovations are well studied, their effect on social learning remains poorly understood. We examined how food availability affects social learning in migrant orangutan unflanged males, who may learn from local orangutans through peering (i.e., observational social learning). We analyzed 1,384 dyadic associations, including 360 peering events, among 46 wild Sumatran orangutan and 25 Bornean orangutan males, collected over 18 years. Migrants’ peering rates significantly increased with higher food availability and time spent in proximity to others. Furthermore, migrants in the more sociable Sumatran population exhibited significantly higher peering rates compared to the Borneans, suggesting intrinsic and/or developmental effects of food availability on social learning. These findings emphasize the importance of investigating ecological effects on social learning on the immediate, developmental, and intrinsic levels for our understanding of cultural evolution.
... The social intelligence hypothesis posits that selection pressures associated with social relationships in complex societies are an evolutionary driver of cognitive complexity. 1-3 Support for this hypothesis comes from comparative studies showing that cognitive performance [4][5][6] and neuroanatomical proxies for cognition 1,7-9 covary with proxies for social complexity, such as group size or mating system. Recently, general cognitive performance has been linked to group size and fitness in Australian magpies. ...
... My suggestion is very much in line with proponents of the "Cultural Intelligence" hypothesis, which claims that more frequent opportunities for social learning should boost an individual's repertoire of learned skills (Van Schaik and Burkart, 2011;Forss et al., 2016;Schuppli et al., 2017;Forss and Willems, 2022). Put differently, improved social learning should boost asocial learning (and in general, a reciprocal causality pattern between biology and culture, with each imposing selective forces on the other, Whitehead et al., 2019). ...
This paper makes three interconnected claims: (i) the “human condition” cannot be captured by evolutionary narratives that reduce it to a recent ‘cognitive modernity', nor by narratives that eliminates all cognitive differences between us and out closest extinct relatives, (ii) signals from paleogenomics, especially coming from deserts of introgression but also from signatures of positive selection, point to the importance of mutations that impact neurodevelopment, plausibly leading to temperamental differences, which may impact cultural evolutionary trajectories in specific ways, and (iii) these trajectories are expected to affect the language phenotypes, modifying what is being learned and how it is put to use. In particular, I hypothesize that these different trajectories influence the development of symbolic systems, the flexible ways in which symbols combine, and the size and configurations of the communities in which these systems are put to use.
... Evidence from primatology suggest that wild apes are neophobic, extremely conservative, and avoid innovation where possible (Forss et al. 2016), a situation which stands in stark contrast to the creative nature of modern human societies. However, the exceptional creativity that characterizes our contemporary situation is not evident for much of our deep history. ...
In this entry we suggest that a shared view of the possible has accompanied the development of successful creative collaboration both in modern time, in the historic past, and from the viewpoint of deep history. The concept of the possible in collaborative creativity is distributed, in rather than predicated on an individual, at times this possible is unknown by all until the moment it becomes actualized. The possible, when considered in this way, becomes a relational phenomenon existing in a shared future both inspiring collaboration and also inspired by it. This entry will start by drawing a distinction between creativity in groups and collaborative creativity before moving to examine how a distributed sense of the possible drives commonly collaborative ventures such as in music or science and how collaboration unfolds across multiple time scales. Finally, we will move to an aspect of creativity more rarely considered from a psychological perspective – that is how creativity appears in the archaeological record. The study of creativity should have great appeal to prehistorians: The remarkable creativity of our species appears to be one of the defining features that separates humans from the rest of the animal world, but an individualist view of creativity has stymied previous study. Our review of the current evidence suggests that the fundamental building blocks of the development of human creativity lie in demographic and neural changes relating to social engagement. This points to the tantalizing suggestion that all creativity should be considered as collaborative.
... We build an individual-based model that reproduces a world inhabited by six populations of "oranzees", a hypothetical ape species. The model is spatially explicit: the oranzees populations are located at relative positions analogous to the six chimpanzees sites in Whiten et al. 1 This is important to determine the potential genetic predispositions 57,58 and ecological availabilities associated with their possible behavioural or artefact forms, or "behaviours" (see below for more details). Population sizes are also taken from the sites in Whiten et al. 1 Following Lind and Lindenfors 59 , we use data from Wrangham et al. 60 , and we define population sizes as N = {20; 42; 49; 76; 50; 95}. ...
The method of exclusion identifies patterns of distributions of behaviours and/or artefact forms among different groups, where these patterns are deemed unlikely to arise from purely genetic and/or ecological factors. The presence of such patterns is often used to establish whether a species is cultural or not—i.e. whether a species uses social learning or not. Researchers using or describing this method have often pointed out that the method cannot pinpoint which specific type(s) of social learning resulted in the observed patterns. However, the literature continues to contain such inferences. In a new attempt to warn against these logically unwarranted conclusions, we illustrate this error using a novel approach. We use an individual-based model, focused on wild ape cultural patterns—as these patterns are the best-known cases of animal culture and as they also contain the most frequent usage of the unwarranted inference for specific social learning mechanisms. We built a model that contained agents unable to copy specifics of behavioural or artefact forms beyond their individual reach (which we define as “copying”). We did so, as some of the previous inference claims related to social learning mechanisms revolve around copying defined in this way. The results of our model however show that non-copying social learning can already reproduce the defining—even iconic—features of observed ape cultural patterns detected by the method of exclusion. This shows, using a novel model approach, that copying processes are not necessary to produce the cultural patterns that are sometimes still used in an attempt to identify copying processes. Additionally, our model could fully control for both environmental and genetic factors (impossible in real life) and thus offers a new validity check for the method of exclusion as related to general cultural claims—a check that the method passed. Our model also led to new and additional findings, which we likewise discuss.
... Data on bonobos were gathered between April and August 2017 at three German zoos: Berlin zoo, Frankfurt zoo, and the Wolfgang Köhler primate center located at Leipzig zoo. For both species of orangutan, we relied on an existing dataset generated by SF between 2012 and 2015 (Damerius, Forss, et al., 2017;Forss et al., 2016). This included data collected on Sumatran orangutans at the following European institutions: Dortmund zoo, Leipzig zoo, Basel zoo, and Durrell Wildlife Park, as well as data on Bornean orangutans from: Apenheul Primate Park, Blackpool zoo, Paignton zoo, Twycross zoo, and Münster zoo. ...
... Independent of the curiosity measurements, we tested the apes with three distinctive physical cognitive tasks: the visible honey trap task (two types of tool use and innovation ability), the detour reaching task (inhibitory control), and a reversal learning task (working memory and flexibility) (Damerius, Graber, et al., 2017;Damerius, Forss, et al., 2017;Forss et al., 2016;Forss et al., 2020). ...
... This suggestion may seem paradoxical at first; however, fits the idea of socially driven interest in novelty Reader and Laland, 2002). Higher social tolerance and more conspecifics provide more social learning situations, and general cognitive skills are believed to increase in species with higher frequency of social learning opportunities (Reader and Laland, 2002;van Schaik and Burkart, 2011;Forss et al., 2016). Be that as it may, based on our current findings, we cannot unambiguously infer a role for curiosity in the problem-solving abilities of great apes, but highlight the necessity for future research to unravel how curiosity impacts learning and cognitive skills in non-human species. ...
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.
... These terms and enriched terms obtained through our analysis on human orthologs of the orangutan genes are either the same or closely related terms as the enriched gene ontology terms for the Sumatran population reported in a SNPbased study (Mattle-Greminger et al., 2018). That study suggested a link between the observed enrichments terms related to neuronal development and the bigger brains and better cognitive skills Sumatran orangutans have compared to the Bornean ones (Taylor and van Schaik, 2007;Wich et al., 2009;Forss et al., 2016). ...
The genus Pongo is ideal to study population genetics adaptation, given its remarkable phenotypic divergence and the highly contrasting environmental conditions it’s been exposed to. Studying its genetic variation bears the promise to reveal a motion picture of these great apes’ evolutionary and adaptive history, and also helps us expand our knowledge of the patterns of adaptation and evolution. In this work, we advance the understanding of the genetic variation among wild orangutans through a genome-wide study of short tandem repeats (STRs). Their elevated mutation rate makes STRs ideal markers for the study of recent evolution within a given population. Current technological and algorithmic advances have rendered their sequencing and discovery more accurate, therefore their potential can be finally leveraged in population genetics studies. To study patterns of population variation within the wild orangutan population, we genotyped the short tandem repeats in a population of 21 individuals spanning four Sumatran and Bornean (sub-) species and eight Southeast Asian regions. We studied the impact of sequencing depth on our ability to genotype STRs and found that the STR copy number changes function as a powerful marker, correctly capturing the demographic history of these populations, even the divergences as recent as 10 Kya. Moreover, gene ontology enrichments for genes close to STR variants are aligned with local adaptations in the two islands. Coupled with more advanced STR-compatible population models, and selection tests, genomic studies based on STRs will be able to reduce the gap caused by the missing heritability for species with recent adaptations.
... The rationale for this research question is derived from the general tenet to view social tolerance as a species-specific trait (e.g. (Balasubramaniam et al., 2018;Forss et al., 2016;Hare et al., 2007)). Corroborating recent evidence that has contested this assumption Kaigaishi et al., 2019;van Leeuwen et al., 2018), we show that chimpanzee groups can differ substantially in their expressions of co-feeding tolerance. ...
Social tolerance in group‐living animals can be viewed as a counterweight against competitive interests necessary to obtain coexistence equilibrium and maintain group cohesion. As such, it forms an interesting phenomenon to study at the group level, but how can this be done most informatively? Here, we use three group‐level co‐feeding assays and social network analysis to study social tolerance in two groups of chimpanzees living under similar circumstances within a sanctuary to i) reassess whether social tolerance may be a group‐specific parameter in chimpanzees and derive inferences about its long‐term stability, and ii) compare the characteristics and resultant patterns between two established and one new assay. We show that the three assays expose the same (predicted) group‐level differences in social tolerance as in the previous study eight years ago, thereby providing preliminary evidence for stability in group‐specific levels of social tolerance in chimpanzees, despite changing group compositions. Furthermore, from an experimental point of view, we identify the new assay as more valid than the two established ones based on the consideration that resources may deplete at different rates across groups, which would consequently alter the need for tolerance differentially. We discuss implications for the study of social tolerance and highlight the importance of taking into account intraspecific variation in social animals.
... From the point of view of this review, of particular interest is the potential feedback between culture and the evolution of cognition (van Schaik and Burkart, 2011;Lotem et al., 2017). For instance, some authors suggest that a reliance on social learning may drive concurrent changes in brain size and neural architecture that facilitate the acquisition and processing of cultural information (Forss et al., 2016;Street et al., 2017). While recent studies have identified a growing number of cultural behaviours in urban-dwelling animals (e.g., Cornell et al., 2012;Aplin et al., 2015), much remains to be learned about cultural transmission in urban environments, how culturally-acquired behaviours enhance fitness, and facilitate morphological, physiological, and cognitive adaptation. ...
Explaining how animals respond to an increasingly urbanised world is a major challenge for evolutionary biologists. Urban environments often present animals with novel problems that differ from those encountered in their evolutionary past. To navigate these rapidly changing habitats successfully, animals may need to adjust their behaviour flexibly over relatively short timescales. These behavioural changes, in turn, may be facilitated by an ability to acquire, store, and process information from the environment. The question of how cognitive abilities allow animals to avoid threats and exploit resources (or constrain their ability to do so) is attracting increasing research interest, with a growing number of studies investigating cognitive and behavioural differences between urban-dwelling animals and their non-urban counterparts. In this review we consider why such differences might arise, focusing on the informational challenges faced by animals living in urban environments, and how different cognitive abilities can assist in overcoming these challenges. We focus largely on birds, as avian taxa have been the subject of most research to date, but discuss work in other species where relevant. We also address the potential consequences of cognitive variation at the individual and species level. For instance, do urban environments select for, or influence the development of, particular cognitive abilities? Are individuals or species with particular cognitive phenotypes more likely to become established in urban habitats? How do other factors, such as social behaviour and individual personality, interact with cognition to influence behaviour in urban environments? The aim of this review is to synthesise current knowledge and identify key avenues for future research, in order to improve our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of urbanisation.
