Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Platt, Michael L.; Seyfarth, Robert M.; Cheney, Dorothy L.

doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0096

Cited by 84 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 136 publications

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“…Another application of transparent games is related to the burgeoning experimental research of social interactions, including the emergent field of social neuroscience that seeks to uncover the neural basis of social signalling and decision-making using neuroimaging and electrophysiology in humans and animals [43][44][45][46]. So far, most studies have focused on sequential [47,48] or simultaneous games [49].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

Unakafov

Schultze

Kagan

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Real-world agents, such as humans, animals and robots, observe each other during interactions and choose their own actions taking the partners' ongoing behaviour into account. Yet, classical game theory assumes that players act either strictly sequentially or strictly simultaneously (without knowing the choices of each other). To account for action visibility and provide a more realistic model of interactions under time constraints, we introduce a new game-theoretic setting called transparent game, where each player has a certain probability to observe the choice of the partner before deciding on its own action. Using evolutionary simulations, we demonstrate that even a small probability of seeing the partner's choice before one's own decision substantially changes evolutionary successful strategies. Action visibility enhances cooperation in a Bach-or-Stravinsky game, but disrupts cooperation in a more competitive iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. In both games, strategies based on the "Win-stay, lose-shift" and "Tit-for-tat" principles are predominant for moderate transparency, while for high transparency strategies of "Leader-Follower" type emerge. Our results have implications for studies of human and animal social behaviour, especially for the analysis of dyadic and group interactions.One of the most interesting questions in economics, biological, and social sciences is the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. A popular framework for studying cooperation (or the lack thereof) is Game Theory, which is frequently used to model interactions between "rational" decision-makers. In particular, a model for repeated interactions is provided by iterated games; two settings were previously used [1]:• Simultaneous games: players act at the same time without having any information about the current choice of the partners. Consequently, all players must make a decision under uncertainty concerning the choices of others.• Sequential games: players act in a certain order and the player acting later in the sequence is guaranteed to see the choices of the preceding players. Here the burden of uncertainty only applies to the first player or -if there are more than two players -becomes lighter with every turn in the sequence.Both settings place a simplifying restriction on the decisional context: either all players have no information about the choices of the partners (simultaneous game), or some players always have more information than others (sequential game). This simplification might be disadvantageous for modelling certain behaviours, since humans and animals usually act neither strictly simultaneously nor

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

Unakafov

Schultze

Kagan

et al. 2018

Preprint

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“…Finally, while we are only beginning to understand how information is encoded in the brains of any species, several recent studies of monkeys provide new insights into the neural encoding of information about numerosity (Neider & Miller, 2004), abstract rules (Miller, Freedman, & Wallis, 2002) and the network of brain regions involved perception of features of the social environment (reviewed in Platt, Seyfarth, & Cheney, 2016), while MRI-based studies of human cognition offer new data on the ways in which humans encode information about objects (Chao & Martin, 2000), number (Cantlon et al, 2009;Nieder & Dehaene, 2009), words that vary in semantic precision (Musz & Thompson-Schill, 2015) and conceptual processing of nouns and verbs (Boylan, Trueswell, & Thompson-Schill, 2015). These results provide further evidence that both the content of information and its underlying mechanisms can be studied empirically.…”

Section: The Neural Basis Of Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origin of meaning in animal signals

Seyfarth

Cheney

2017

Animal Behaviour

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Over 40 years ago, Peter Marler proposed that animal signals were adaptive because they provided listeners with information (Marler, 1961, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1, 295e317). But what was the nature of this information? How did it influence behaviour? And how might the information in animal signals compare with the information in human language? Here we review evidence that signals in a variety of social contexts are adaptive because they convey information. For recipients, meaning results from the integration of information from the signal and the social context. As a result, communication in animals e particularly in long-lived, social species where the same individuals interact repeatedly e constitutes a rich system of pragmatic inference in which the meaning of a communicative event depends on perception, memory and social knowledge. In the human lineage, pragmatics served as a precursor to the later evolution of semantics and syntax. Among primates, there is a striking difference in flexibility between constrained call production and more flexible perception and cognition. However, call production is more flexible in the wild, where it is affected by contextual cues, than in laboratory studies where contextual cues have been removed. Monkeys and apes may overcome the limits of constrained vocal production by producing composite signals in the same and different modalities.In this essay we focus on an issue that was central to Peter Marler's research on animal communication: the meaning of animal signals.Research on animal communication has made almost no progress in understanding the semantics of natural signaling behavior because it is an exceedingly difficult problem in both practical and theoretical terms. … There is an irresistible tendency to use language as a model, either for comparison or contrast. This would be more appropriate if we really understood human semantics and the processes by which language acquires meaning in the course of our own early development. In many respects our picture of how words acquire meaning in human infancy is hardly any clearer than our understanding of the meanings of signals for animals … In both human and animal studies, for example, there are assertions of the overwhelming importance of contextual cues in understanding meaning (Smith, 1977), but precisely how the context influences meaning in particular cases has hardly been explored. (Marler, 1983)Marler's interests in the meaning of animal signals brought him squarely into the revolution in neurobiology, psychology, linguistics and cognitive science. When he began his research in the 1950s, questions about the 'minds' of animals had largely been ignored, because both psychologists like Skinner and ethologists like Tinbergen thought they were unanswerable and hence unsuited to scientific inquiry (Boakes, 1984;Burkhardt, 2005). Over the years, Marler developed a different view (Marler, 1961). He thought that, regardless of whether or not they were voluntary or intentional, animal signals provided listeners ...

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“…However, the rule 'help someone who has helped you before' can be selected under a much wider range of conditions, for instance involving individual relationships such as partnerships and friendships [7,[162][163][164], and contingency may be based on the integration of several interactions over longer timespans (attitudinal reciprocity [165]). If exchanges of different commodities are considered as well [136], the power of this mechanism emerges even more clearly (see [166] for a discussion of underlying mechanisms). It is an unfortunate misunderstanding that the functionality of direct reciprocity is often tied to a narrowly defined set of exchange rules used to model stable solutions to the prisoner's dilemma, such as 'tit-for-tat' exchanges or 'calculated reciprocity' [165,167].…”

Section: (B) Direct Reciprocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation

Taborsky

Frommen

Riehl

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

122

199

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One contribution of 18 to a theme issue 'The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits.' Subject Areas: behaviour, evolution, ecology Keywords: cooperation, reciprocity, commodity trading, direct fitness benefits, non-kin, decision rules The general belief that cooperation and altruism in social groups result primarily from kin selection has recently been challenged, not least because results from cooperatively breeding insects and vertebrates have shown that groups may be composed mainly of non-relatives. This allows testing predictions of reciprocity theory without the confounding effect of relatedness. Here, we review complementary and alternative evolutionary mechanisms to kin selection theory and provide empirical examples of cooperative behaviour among unrelated individuals in a wide range of taxa. In particular, we focus on the different forms of reciprocity and on their underlying decision rules, asking about evolutionary stability, the conditions selecting for reciprocity and the factors constraining reciprocal cooperation. We find that neither the cognitive requirements of reciprocal cooperation nor the often sequential nature of interactions are insuperable stumbling blocks for the evolution of reciprocity. We argue that simple decision rules such as 'help anyone if helped by someone' should get more attention in future research, because empirical studies show that animals apply such rules, and theoretical models find that they can create stable levels of cooperation under a wide range of conditions. Owing to its simplicity, behaviour based on such a heuristic may in fact be ubiquitous. Finally, we argue that the evolution of exchange and trading of service and commodities among social partners needs greater scientific focus.

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Adaptations for social cognition in the primate brain

Cited by 84 publications

References 136 publications

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

Emergence and suppression of cooperation by action visibility in transparent games

The origin of meaning in animal signals

Correlated pay-offs are key to cooperation

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