Community-specific evaluation of tool affordances in wild chimpanzees.

ABSTRACT: The notion of animal culture, defined as socially transmitted community-specific behaviour patterns, remains controversial, notably because the definition relies on surface behaviours without addressing underlying cognitive processes. In contrast, human cultures are the product of socially acquired ideas that shape how individuals interact with their environment. We conducted field experiments with two culturally distinct chimpanzee communities in Uganda, which revealed significant differences in how individuals considered the affording parts of an experimentally provided tool to extract honey from a standardised cavity. Firstly, individuals of the two communities found different functional parts of the tool salient, suggesting that they experienced a cultural bias in their cognition. Seco

SUBMITTER: Gruber T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3216609 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature