ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2013
'Captivity bias' in animal tool use and its implications for the evolution of hominin technology.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Potential Tool Use by Wolves (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Opportunistic Tool Use by Two Unexpected Corvid Species.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Wild and zoo-housed orangutans differ in how they explore objects.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals.iScience · 2025Article
- Naïve, adult, captive chimpanzees do not socially learn how to make and use sharp stone tools.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Free hand hitting of stone-like objects in wild gorillas.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Captivity and habituation to humans raise curiosity in vervet monkeys.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Article
- Tools of the trade: the bio-cultural evolution of the human propensity to trade.Biology & philosophy · 2022Article
- Bridging Captive and Wild Studies: Behavioral Plasticity and Social Complexity inAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Extending the Reach of Tooling Theory: A Neurocognitive and Phylogenetic Perspective.Topics in cognitive science · 2021Article
- Using an Innovation Arena to compare wild-caught and laboratory Goffin's cockatoos.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- Exploring individual variation in associative learning abilities through an operant conditioning task in wild baboons.PloS one · 2020Article
- What animals do not do or fail to find: A novel observational approach for studying cognition in the wild.Evolutionary anthropology · 2019Review
- Chimpanzee extractive foraging with excavating tools: Experimental modeling of the origins of human technology.PloS one · 2019Article
- Habitual tool use innovated by free-living New Zealand kea.Scientific reports · 2018Article
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Abstract
Animals in captive or laboratory settings may outperform wild animals of the same species in both frequency and diversity of tool use, a phenomenon here termed 'captivity bias'. Although speculative at this stage, a logical conclusion from this concept is that animals whose tool-use behaviour is observed solely under natural conditions may be judged cognitively or physically inferior than if they had also been tested or observed under controlled captive conditions. In turn, this situation creates a potential problem for studies of the behaviour of extinct members of the human family tree-the hominins-as hominin cognitive abilities are often judged on material evidence of tool-use behaviour left in the archaeological record. In this review, potential factors contributing to captivity bias in primates (including increased contact between individuals engaged in tool use, guidance or shaping of tool-use behaviour by other tool-users and increased free time and energy) are identified and assessed for their possible effects on the behaviour of the Late Pleistocene hominin Homo floresiensis. The captivity bias concept provides one way to uncouple hominin tool use from cognition, by considering hominins as subject to the same adaptive influences as other tool-using animals.
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