ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. 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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sociability Under Anthropogenic Change: From Individual Behaviour to Population-Level Consequences.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- Primate-Inspired Cooperation Emergence and Strategy Generation in Heterogeneous Robot Swarm.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Savanna chimpanzee tool and fruit transfers facilitate the transmission of technological behaviours at Dindefelo, Senegal.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Insect applications to open wounds by chimpanzees in the wild: first insights from East African chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Distribution of Serotonergic Transporter Innervation in the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Pallidum Is Highly Conserved Among Primates.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Concerted conservation actions to support chimpanzee cultures.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) mentally represent collaboration?: Action-learning and communication in a partnered task.PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Cumulative cultural evolution has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. One plausible condition for cumulative cultural evolution to emerge is individuals' ability to use social learning to acquire know-how that they cannot easily innovate by themselves. It has been suggested that chimpanzees may be capable of such know-how social learning, but this assertion remains largely untested. Here we show that chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill that they failed to independently innovate. By teaching chimpanzees how to solve a sequential task (one chimpanzee in each of the two tested groups, n = 66) and using network-based diffusion analysis, we found that 14 naive chimpanzees learned to operate a puzzle box that they failed to operate during the preceding three months of exposure to all necessary materials. In conjunction, we present evidence for the hypothesis that social learning in chimpanzees is necessary and sufficient to acquire a new, complex skill after the initial innovation.
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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.