Developmental changes in food transfers in cotton‐top tamarins (<i>Saguinus oedipus</i>)

Joyce, Stella M.; Snowdon, Charles T.

doi:10.1002/ajp.20393

Cited by 24 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Adults also transfer food to twins earlier than to singletons, and twins fed independently and used food-associated calls earlier than singletons, supporting the learning hypothesis (Joyce and Snowdon 2007). However, begging and food transfers impede learning, and adult withdrawal of food transfers is needed to encourage independent foraging (Dillis et al 2010; Humle and Snowdon 2008; Joyce and Snowdon 2007). The change of context in the use of food-offering calls in golden lion tamarins, from indication of transfer to indication of food source, could also encourage earlier independent foraging, as our results suggest.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

et al. 2018

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Many animals emit calls in the presence of food, but researchers do not always know the function of these calls. Evidence suggests that adult golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults’ behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tamarins that were introduced to a novel substrate while exposed to playbacks of food-offering calls (experimental condition) to the performance of three juveniles that were exposed to the novel substrate without the presence of food-offering playbacks (control condition). We varied the location of the novel substrate between trials. We found that food-offering calls had an immediate effect on juveniles’ interactions with the novel substrate, whether they inserted their hands into the substrate and their eating behavior, and a long-term effect on eating behavior at the substrate. The findings imply that juvenile golden lion tamarins can learn through food-offering calls about the availability of food at a substrate, which is consistent with (but does not prove) teaching in golden lion tamarins through stimulus enhancement. Our findings support the hypothesis that teaching might be more likely to evolve in cooperatively breeding species with complex ecological niches.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s10764-018-0069-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

et al. 2018

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“…18,[66][67][68] First described 30 years ago in captive golden lion tamarins, 69 the calls, termed food-offering or food-transfer vocalizations, act as infant and juvenile caretaking behaviors ( Table 1). Studies of captive cotton-top tamarins have demonstrated that adults emit more food-offering calls when infants are present than when they are not 67 and that attempts by infants to take food from adults are more successful when the adult has vocalized. 68 Callitrichids are the only primates known to exhibit contextspecific food-offering calls to their young.…”

Section: Imitationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social influences on foraging behavior in young nonhuman primates: Learning what, where, and how to eat

Rapaport

Brown

2008

Evolutionary Anthropology

159

148

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Human infants rely on social interactions to acquire food‐related information.1, 2 Adults actively teach children about food through culturally diverse feeding practices. Characteristics we share with the other primates, such as complex diets, highly social lives, and extended juvenile periods, suggest that social learning may be important during ontogeny throughout the order. Although all young primates typically pay attention to feeding adults, great apes and callitrichids, in particular, acquire new foraging techniques through abilities unknown in other nonhuman primates; that is, they learn by imitation. However, ape social learning is almost exclusively infant‐initiated, while adult callitrichids actively teach their young. It is unlikely that the same selective forces have acted to favor sophisticated social‐learning mechanisms in both taxa.3, 4 Equipped with an ape brain, complex foraging methods, and a cooperative infant‐care system, early hominins were uniquely poised to take social learning about food and foraging techniques to a new level.

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“…Beyond the relatively egalitarian social structures, the relationship between parents and offspring includes dynamic behaviors (i.e. food transfer calls [Roush & Snowdon, 2001]; begging behavior by offspring [Joyce & Snowdon, 2007]; and food transfers that influence rates of learning, e.g. independent foraging, over the course of development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These quantifiable behaviors provide an avenue in which to examine developmental patterns, individual differences, and behavioral interactions that influence learning success and to test hypotheses pertinent to socially biased learning, including whether a demonstrator's tolerance for another individual increases their ability to learn. Joyce and Snowdon [2007] observed that voluntary food transfers from a parent to an infant (3-5 months) initially encouraged the infant's propensity to forage independently, but adult withdrawal of food transfers was needed to encourage independent foraging. A similar effect was found in juveniles (6-9 months) learning to solve a novel foraging task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Socially biased learning among adult cottontop tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)

Dillis

Humle

Snowdon

2009

American J Primatol

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We presented adult cottontop tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) with a novel foraging task that had been used previously to examine socially biased learning of juvenile observers [Humle & Snowdon, Animal Behaviour 75:267-277, 2008]. The task could be solved in one of two ways, and thus allowed for an analysis of behavioral matching between an observer and a skilled demonstrator (trained to use one of the two methods exclusively). Because the demonstrator was an adult in both this study and the juvenile study, the influence of the observer's age could be isolated and examined, as well as the behavior of demonstrators toward observers of different ages. Our main goals were to (1) compare adults and juveniles acquiring the same task to identify how the age of the observer affects socially biased learning and (2) examine the relationship between socially biased learning and behavioral matching in adults. Although adults spent less time observing the trained demonstrators than did juveniles, the adults were more proficient at solving the task. Furthermore, even though observers did not overtly match the behavior of the demonstrator, observation remained an important factor in the success of these individuals. The findings suggested that adult observers could extract information needed to solve a novel foraging task without explicitly matching the behavior of the demonstrator. Adult observers begged much less than juveniles and demonstrators did not respond to begging from adult. Skill acquisition and the process of socially biased learning are, therefore, age-dependent and are influenced by the behavioral interactions between observer and demonstrator. To what extent this holds true for other primates or animal species still needs to be more fully investigated and considered when designing experiments and interpreting results.

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Developmental changes in food transfers in cotton‐top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)

Cited by 24 publications

References 19 publications

Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

Social influences on foraging behavior in young nonhuman primates: Learning what, where, and how to eat

Socially biased learning among adult cottontop tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)

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