An understanding of third-party friendships in a tolerant macaque

Whitehouse, Jamie; Meunier, Hélène

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-66407-w

Cited by 16 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…The species Macaca tonkeana is a member of a group of closely related Sulawesi macaque species, all living in multi-male and multi-female egalitarian and highly tolerant societies [28,29]. Indeed, compared with other species of macaques, Sulawesi macaques' social interactions are more complex and more influenced by friendships than by dominance and kinships [29][30][31][32][33]. However, the non-social cognition skills of Tonkean macaques seem to be comparable to those observed in other species of macaques [34].…”

Section: Materials and Methods (A) Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques’ decision-making

Nioche

Rougier

Deffains

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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In humans, the attitude toward risk is not neutral and is dissimilar between bets involving gains and bets involving losses. The existence and prevalence of these decision features in non-human primates are unclear. In addition, only a few studies have tried to simulate the evolution of agents based on their attitude toward risk. Therefore, we still ignore to what extent Prospect theory’s claims are evolutionarily rooted. To shed light on this issue, we collected data from nine macaques that performed bets involving gains or losses. We confirmed that their overall behaviour is coherent with Prospect theory’s claims. In parallel, we used a genetic algorithm to simulate the evolution of a population of agents across several generations. We showed that the algorithm selects progressively agents that exhibit risk-seeking, and has an inverted S-shape distorted perception of probability. We compared these two results and found that monkeys’ attitude toward risk is only congruent with the simulation when they are facing losses. This result is consistent with the idea that gambling in the loss domain is analogous to deciding in a context of life-threatening challenges where a certain level of risk-seeking behaviour and probability distortion may be adaptive. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’.

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Section: Materials and Methods (A) Subjectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques’ decision-making

Nioche

Rougier

Deffains

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…The last set of direct observations was performed by another author (JW; Dataset 3) using the same focal animal sampling procedure between the 28/01/2019 and the 27/05/2019. This third dataset was already used in another study (Whitehouse and Meunier 2020).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the reliability of an automated method for measuring dominance hierarchy in nonhuman primates

Ballesta

Sadoughi

Whitehouse

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Among animals’ societies, dominance is an important social factor that influences inter-individual relationships. However, assessing dominance hierarchy can be a time-consuming activity which is potentially impeded by environmental factors, difficulties in the recognition of animals, or through the disturbance of animals during data collection. Here we took advantage of novel devices, Machines for Automated Learning and Testing (MALT), designed primarily to study nonhuman primates’ cognition - to additionally measure the social structure of a primate group. When working on a MALT, an animal can be replaced by another; which could reflect an asymmetric dominance relationship (or could happen by chance). To assess the reliability of our automated method, we analysed a sample of the automated conflicts with video scoring and found that 75% of these replacements include genuine forms of social displacements. We thus first designed a data filtering procedure to exclude events that should not be taken into account when automatically assessing social hierarchies in monkeys. Then, we analysed months of daily use of MALT by 25 semi-free ranging Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana) and found that dominance relationships inferred from these interactions strongly correlate with the ones derived from observations of spontaneous agonistic interactions collected during the same time period. We demonstrate that this method can be used to assess the evolution of individual social status, as well as group-wide hierarchical stability longitudinally with minimal research labour. Further, it facilitates a continuous assessment of dominance hierarchies, even during unpredictable environmental or challenging social events. Altogether, this study supports the use of MALT as a reliable tool to automatically and dynamically assess social status within groups of nonhuman primates, including juveniles.

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“…iOS functionality is currently in development (https://archi ve.cyber track er.org/softw are/getti ng-started). & Meunier, 2020;Whitehouse et al, 2017). However, the app has also been used for studies with other mammals (van der Marel et al, 2019Marel et al, , 2021Szott et al, 2019) and birds (Benti et al, 2019;Puehringer-Sturmayr et al, 2020;Szipl et al, 2019).…”

Section: Potential Drawbacks or Other Considerations Of Cybertrackermentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of low‐cost behavioral observation software applications for handheld computers and recommendations for use

et al. 2021

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In the field of animal behavior and behavioral ecology, many standardized methods to observe animal behavior were established in the last decades. While the protocols remained similar, behavioral researchers can take advantage of technological advancements to enter observations directly onto a handheld computer (phone, tablet, etc.), saving time and potentially increasing fidelity of recordings. However, we now have the choice between many different platforms for recording behavioral observations. Our challenge is choosing the most appropriate platform that fits a particular study question, research design, budget, and desired amount of preparatory time.Here, we review six low-cost software applications for handheld computers that are available for real-time entry of behavioral observations: Animal Behaviour Pro, Animal Observer, BORIS, CyberTracker, Prim8, and ZooMonitor. We discuss the preliminary decisions that have to be made about the study design, and we assess the six applications by providing the advantages and disadvantages of each platform and an overall application comparison. In our supplemental material, we illustrate the setup and data collection routines, and how to customize certain platforms so they will work more effectively for particular study aims or sampling methods. Our goal is to help researchers make calculated decisions about what behavioral observation platform is best for their study system and question.

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An understanding of third-party friendships in a tolerant macaque

Cited by 16 publications

References 48 publications

The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques’ decision-making

The adaptive value of probability distortion and risk-seeking in macaques’ decision-making

Assessing the reliability of an automated method for measuring dominance hierarchy in nonhuman primates

A comparison of low‐cost behavioral observation software applications for handheld computers and recommendations for use

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