ArticleBiology letters2014
Human children rely more on social information than chimpanzees do.
Article in Biology letters, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- EVApeCognition: An 18-Year Dataset of Great Ape Cognition.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Foraging zebra finches (Biology letters · 2021Article
- Travel linearity and speed of human foragers and chimpanzees during their daily search for food in tropical rainforests.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Evolutionary Developmental Psychology: 2017 Redux.Child development · 2018Article
- Testing differential use of payoff-biased social learning strategies in children and chimpanzees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Conformity cannot be identified based on population-level signatures.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Why developmental psychology is incomplete without comparative and cross-cultural perspectives.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human societies are characterized by more cultural diversity than chimpanzee communities. However, it is currently unclear what mechanism might be driving this difference. Because reliance on social information is a pivotal characteristic of culture, we investigated individual and social information reliance in children and chimpanzees. We repeatedly presented subjects with a reward-retrieval task on which they had collected conflicting individual and social information of equal accuracy in counterbalanced order. While both species relied mostly on their individual information, children but not chimpanzees searched for the reward at the socially demonstrated location more than at a random location. Moreover, only children used social information adaptively when individual knowledge on the location of the reward had not yet been obtained. Social information usage determines information transmission and in conjunction with mechanisms that create cultural variants, such as innovation, it facilitates diversity. Our results may help explain why humans are more culturally diversified than chimpanzees.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.