ArticleScientific reports2016
Foundations of cumulative culture in apes: improved foraging efficiency through relinquishing and combining witnessed behaviours in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use.Animal cognition · 2018Pooled it
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Capuchin monkeys learn to use information equally well from individual exploration and social demonstration.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Six adult male rhesus monkeys did not learn from the choices of a conspecific shown in videos.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- The importance of thinking about the future in culture and cumulative cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Maintenance of prior behaviour can enhance cultural selection.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem.iScience · 2021Article
- Great apes selectively retrieve relevant memories to guide action.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Examining the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of animal tool behaviour.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Chimpanzees Predict the Hedonic Outcome of Novel Taste Combinations: The Evolutionary Origins of Affective Forecasting.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Experimental assessment of capacities for cumulative culture: Review and evaluation of methods.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2020Review
- Article
- The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
A vital prerequisite for cumulative culture, a phenomenon often asserted to be unique to humans, is the ability to modify behaviour and flexibly switch to more productive or efficient alternatives. Here, we first established an inefficient solution to a foraging task in five captive chimpanzee groups (N = 19). Three groups subsequently witnessed a conspecific using an alternative, more efficient, solution. When participants could successfully forage with their established behaviours, most individuals did not switch to this more efficient technique; however, when their foraging method became substantially less efficient, nine chimpanzees with socially-acquired information (four of whom witnessed additional human demonstrations) relinquished their old behaviour in favour of the more efficient one. Only a single chimpanzee in control groups, who had not witnessed a knowledgeable model, discovered this. Individuals who switched were later able to combine components of their two learned techniques to produce a more efficient solution than their extensively used, original foraging method. These results suggest that, although chimpanzees show a considerable degree of conservatism, they also have an ability to combine independent behaviours to produce efficient compound action sequences; one of the foundational abilities (or candidate mechanisms) for human cumulative culture.
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