ArticlePloS one2017
Food cleaning in gorillas: Social learning is a possibility but not a necessity.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Costs of Early Stone Toolmaking cannot Establish the Presence of Know-how Copying.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Art beyond cognition: reframing Neanderthal art through social connectivity and cultural transmission.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- The method of exclusion (still) cannot identify specific mechanisms of cultural inheritance.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Early knapping techniques do not necessitate cultural transmission.Science advances · 2022Article
- Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Review
- Spontaneous (minimal) ritual in non-human great apes?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Examining the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of animal tool behaviour.Biology letters · 2020Article
- Divergent strategies in faeces avoidance between two cercopithecoid primates.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Biology & philosophy · 2020Article
- Testing the individual and social learning abilities of task-naïve captive chimpanzees (PeerJ · 2020Article
- Article
- Birch tar production does not prove Neanderthal behavioral complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Naive, captive long-tailed macaques (Royal Society open science · 2018Article
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
Food cleaning is widespread in the animal kingdom, and a recent report confirmed that (amongst other behaviours) wild western lowland gorillas also show food cleaning. The authors of this report conclude that this behaviour, based on its distribution patterns, constitutes a potential candidate for culture. While different conceptualisations of culture exist, some more and some less reliant on behavioural form copying, all of them assign a special role to social learning processes in explaining potentially cultural behaviours. Here we report the results of an experiment that tested to what extent food cleaning behaviour in a group of captive Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) relies on social learning processes. Subjects were provided with clean and dirty apples. When they were provided with dirty apples, all subjects showed evidence of food cleaning in at least 75% of trials. Preferred cleaning techniques differed between individuals, four out of five of subjects expressed a behaviour analogous to that reported in wild conspecifics. Given this occurrence of food cleaning in a culturally unconnected population of gorillas, we conclude that social learning is unlikely to play a central role in the emergence of the food cleaning behavioural form in Western lowland gorillas; instead, placing a greater emphasis on individual learning of food cleaning's behavioural form.
Indexed as
Identifiers
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.