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Inferences about food location in three cercopithecine species: an insight into the socioecological cognition of primates

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Abstract

Many animal species use a variety of cognitive strategies to locate food resources. One strategy is to make inferences by exclusion, i.e., perceiving the absence of reward as a cue that another location should be investigated. The use of such advanced cognitive strategies may be more prominent in species that are known to frequently solve social challenges, and inferential reasoning has mainly been investigated in social species such as corvids, dogs, dolphins and non-human primates. In this paper, we investigate how far social intricacy may explain the disparity of reasoning performances observed in three cercopithecine species that differ in the density of their social network and the diversity of their social partners. We used standard reasoning tasks, testing the volume concept and inference by exclusion using visual and auditory modalities. We showed that Old World monkeys can infer the location of invisible food by exclusion. In addition, Tonkean macaques and olive baboons had greater performances in most tasks compared to rhesus macaques. These responses are consistent with the social complexity displayed by these three species. We suggest that the cognitive strategies required to navigate through a demanding social world are involved in the understanding of the physical domain.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to B. Thierry for fruitful comments and to J. Lignot (Munro Language Services) for language editing. While preparing the manuscript, Odile Petit was supported by the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies (USIAS).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical standards

The experiment complied with the “Principles of Animal Care” publication No. 86-23 (revised 1985) of the National Institutes of Health and with current legislation (L87-848) for animal experimentation. Permission was obtained from the Biomedical Primate Research Centre animal experimentation committee (Dier Experimenten Commissie, DEC) to conduct the experiments with the rhesus macaques housed there (DEC-#532).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département Ecologie, Physiologie et Ethologie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Strasbourg, France

    Odile Petit, Valérie Dufour & Marie Herrenschmidt

  2. Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

    Odile Petit, Valérie Dufour & Marie Herrenschmidt

  3. Parco Faunistico di Piano dell’Abatino, San Lorenzo, Italy

    Arianna De Marco

  4. Fondazione Ethoikos, Radicondoli, Italy

    Arianna De Marco

  5. Animal Ecology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Elisabeth H. M. Sterck

  6. Ethology Research, Biomedical Primate Research Centre, Rijswijk, The Netherlands

    Elisabeth H. M. Sterck

  7. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

    Josep Call

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  1. Odile Petit
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  2. Valérie Dufour
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  3. Marie Herrenschmidt
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  5. Elisabeth H. M. Sterck
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Correspondence to Odile Petit.

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Petit, O., Dufour, V., Herrenschmidt, M. et al. Inferences about food location in three cercopithecine species: an insight into the socioecological cognition of primates. Anim Cogn 18, 821–830 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0848-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0848-2

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