Revisiting play elements and self-handicapping in play: A comparative ethogram of five Old World monkey species.

Abstract

Play behavior has been viewed as a mixture of elements drawn from "serious" behavior, interspersed by ritualized play signals. Two other types of play behaviors have been overlooked: patterns that are dissimilar from any serious behavior and patterns with self-handicapping character, that is, those that put the animal into unnecessary disadvantageous positions or situations. Here the authors show that these 2 types of patterns can constitute a major part of play repertoire. From our own videorecordings and observations, we constructed play ethograms of 5 monkey species (Semnopithecus entellus, Erythrocebus patas, Chlorocebus pygerythrus, Cercopithecus neglectus, and Cercopithecus diana). The authors evaluated the self-handicapping character of each pattern and in Hanuman langurs also the (dis)similarity to serious behavior. Of the 74 patterns in the 5 species, 33 (45%) were judged to have a self-handicapping character. Of 48 patterns observed in langurs, 16 (33%) were totally dissimilar to any serious langur behavior known to us. The authors discuss the possibility that the different types of play elements may have different functions in play.

Ontogenetic Trajectories of Chimpanzee Social Play: Similarities with Humans

“…Such an interpretation agrees with data on human youngsters, whose play bouts can turn into overt aggression [35], [38] (Prediction 2 supported). The unbalanced play sessions between infants may reflect different degrees of maturity in motor skills and/or the lack of capacity to fine-tune sessions due to difficulties in performing self-handicapping (a playmate, independently from his/her age, puts him/herself into unnecessary disadvantageous positions or situations) [3], [9] and motor inhibition [70]. This conclusion is supported by the lower complexity of infant play sessions characterized by few motor patterns which are highly repeated (see Fig.…”

“…Frequently, play seems to involve an array of motor patterns, both typical of serious functional contexts (e.g. agonistic, antipredatory, and mating behavior) [6]–[8] as well as playful actions [9]. However, the main difference between playful and serious contexts is not in the actual behavioral patterns, but how they are performed [10], [11].…”

Machine vision methods for analyzing social interactions

“…2C) (Adamo and Hoy, 1995;Dankert et al, 2009;Seeds et al, 2014;York et al, 2015). Both time budgets and transition probabilities can be compared across species (Petru et al, 2009), strains (de Chaumont et al, 2012Kabra et al, 2013) or experimental conditions (Branson et al, 2009;Saka et al, 2004). More detailed analyses of labeled behavior can also be performed; for example, where or when a particular behavior occurs.…”

Rough‐and‐tumble play as a window on animal communication

“…However, specialized signals are usually encoded in rather stereotypic movements to transmit information reliably (Morris, ; Zahavi, ; Hinde, ; McFarland, ) but Petrů et al . () found these patterns very variable. Moreover, they were also present in solitary play, so how these actions function as possible play‐facilitating signals remains to be resolved.…”