Information Gathering: A Component of the Defensive Behavior of Rats and Old-World Monkeys

Abstract

Rodents commonly approach sources of threat in a characteristic posture of stretched approach. There is considerable support for the view that the function of stretched-approach sequences is the acquisition of information about potential sources of danger. To determine whether monkeys, like rodents, engage in defensive information gathering, we recorded the behavior of three Old World monkeys (Cercopithecus species) after each had been exposed to threat in a seminatural environment. Each monkey displayed an intense startle and flight reaction when a jack-in-the-box that it was inspecting was triggered. Nevertheless, within seconds (M = 8 s), each monkey returned to the jack-in-the-box and spent much of the 20-min test session inspecting it (M = 905 s) while largely ignoring the stuffed-bear control object (M = 203 s). These results, in combination with previous studies of stretched-approach behavior in rodents, suggest that information gathering is an important defensive strategy in a variety of mammalian species. In the past two decades, theories of animal behavior have started to portray animals as users of information rather than as S-R automatons. Recent ethoexperimental studies of animal defense indicate that animals are more than passive receivers of information. Animals exposed to a threatening object purposefully approach the object to collect information about it.