ArticleAmerican journal of primatology2017
The relationship between social play and developmental milestones in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii).
Article in American journal of primatology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- The play fever: individual and group factors influence the contagion of play behaviour within social hominid groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Reconsidering Whether Knuckle-Walking Gave Rise to Bipedalism in Light of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Review
- Chicks of cavity-nesting birds do not 'exercise' prior to fledging.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of parenting and infant-evoked aggression.Physiological reviews · 2025Review
- Juvenile social play predicts adult reproductive success in male bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Infant spatial relationships with adult males in a wild primate: males as mitigators or magnifiers of intergenerational effects of early adversity?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Ecological variation in adult social play reveals a hidden cost of motherhood for wild chimpanzees.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Commemorating the monkey bars, catalyst of debate at the intersection of human evolutionary biology and public health.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Review
- Article
- The practicality of practice: A model of the function of play behaviour.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Maternal flexibility in Galápagos sea lions mitigates climate impacts but not population decline.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Social play is common among many group-living animals, but the benefits are not well understood. Proposed benefits include increased muscle coordination as the result of increased locomotor versatility and development, and strengthened social bonds through interactions with like-aged individuals. In this study, we used 33 years of long-term behavioral data on infant chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, to examine these potential benefits of social play, specifically how the percentage of time engaged in social play relates to motor and social developmental milestones. We predicted that infants who engaged in more social play would achieve motor and social milestones at younger ages. We found that individuals that spent more time engaging in social play achieved the motor milestones of riding dorsally and traveling independently at earlier ages. Additionally, we found that the amount of play was correlated with earlier ages for reaching the social milestones of spatial independence from mother, first grooming of non-maternal kin, and first observed mating attempt. This is the first study in great apes to demonstrate a relationship between play behavior and developmental milestones, supporting the hypotheses that play provides motor, and social benefits.
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