Study shows how social bonds help tool-using monkeys learn new skills

Anthropologists and psychologists have studied wild monkeys’ problem-solving for food to better understand how social dynamics can influence behavior and learning. The research team, led by Durham University’s Department of Anthropology, studied two groups of wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park.

The researchers installed a large box in the park which contained food that the monkeys could access by either lifting a door or pulling a knob. The team observed which monkeys learned how to access the food, and how that information then spread to the rest of their group.

The researchers specifically focused on the role played by social tolerance in the learning of problem-solving behavior. Social tolerance determines who is allowed in proximity to whom and granted access to resources such as food or social information.

The study indicates that the monkeys mainly learned from others via direct observation and strong social tolerance (e.g. among grooming partners) was found to be a good predictor of which monkeys would learn from each other.

Beyond the influence of social tolerance, naïve monkeys were more likely to observe, and potentially learn from, successful males in the group.

The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Rachel Kendal of Durham University’s Department of Anthropology co-supervised the study.

She said, “Bearded capuchins possess the largest ‘toolkit’ among monkeys, and this is likely due to social learning, enabling skills to be passed down the generations.

“Once we’d established that social learning was happening, we wanted to study what influenced the pattern of who was learning from whom.

“We looked at social tolerance and found that the individuals who displayed strong indicators of social tolerance in their everyday lives, such as grooming or eating close together, were more likely to observe each other when interacting with the puzzle-box.

“We also found that social tolerance influenced how information about solving the puzzle-box spread among the groups.

“For example, a skill may not be learned by others if the individual possessing the skill is not of a sufficient status to be observed or, conversely, is intolerant to the proximity of others and so doesn’t allow themselves to be observed.

“So, our findings indicate that social tolerance enables social learning, which may be biased towards successful individuals, and this may shed light on the evolutionary forces involved in primate, including human, cultural abilities.”

The study was co-supervised by Eduardo B. Ottoni of the Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

The lead authors are Camila Galheigo Coelho and Ivan Garcia-Nisa, both former Ph.D. researchers in the Anthropology Department at Durham University.