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Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini).

ABSTRACT: Tool use can be inherited, or acquired as an individual innovation or by social transmission. Having previously reported individual innovative tool use and manufacture by a Goffin cockatoo, we used the innovator (Figaro, a male) as a demonstrator to investigate social transmission. Twelve Goffins saw either demonstrations by Figaro, or 'ghost' controls where tools and/or food were manipulated using magnets. Subjects observing demonstrations showed greater tool-related performance than ghost controls, with all three males in this group (but not the three females) acquiring tool-using competence. Two of these three males further acquired tool-manufacturing competence. As the actions of successful observers differed from those of the demonstrator, result emulation rather than high-fidelity imitation is the most plausible transmission mechanism.

SUBMITTER: Auersperg AM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4173672 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini).

Auersperg A M I AM von Bayern A M I AM Weber S S Szabadvari A A Bugnyar T T Kacelnik A A

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20141001 1793

Tool use can be inherited, or acquired as an individual innovation or by social transmission. Having previously reported individual innovative tool use and manufacture by a Goffin cockatoo, we used the innovator (Figaro, a male) as a demonstrator to investigate social transmission. Twelve Goffins saw either demonstrations by Figaro, or 'ghost' controls where tools and/or food were manipulated using magnets. Subjects observing demonstrations showed greater tool-related performance than ghost cont ...[more]

PMID: 25185997

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Project description:Flexible targeted helping is considered an advanced form of prosocial behavior in hominoids, as it requires the actor to assess different situations that a conspecific may be in, and to subsequently flexibly satisfy different needs of that partner depending on the nature of those situations. So far, apart from humans such behaviour has only been experimentally shown in chimpanzees and in Eurasian jays. Recent studies highlight the prosocial tendencies of several bird species, yet flexible targeted helping remained untested, largely due to methodological issues as such tasks are generally designed around tool-use, and very few bird species are capable of tool-use. Here, we tested Goffin's cockatoos, which proved to be skilled tool innovators in captivity, in a tool transfer task in which an actor had access to four different objects/tools and a partner to one of two different apparatuses that each required one of these tools to retrieve a reward. As expected from this species, we recorded playful object transfers across all conditions. Yet, importantly and similar to apes, three out of eight birds transferred the correct tool more often in the test condition than in a condition that also featured an apparatus but no partner. Furthermore, one of these birds transferred that correct tool first more often before transferring any other object in the test condition than in the no-partner condition, while the other two cockatoos were marginally non-significantly more likely to do so. Additionally, there was no difference in the likelihood of the correct tool being transferred first for either of the two apparatuses, suggesting that these birds flexibly adjusted what to transfer based on their partner´s need. Future studies should focus on explanations for the intra-specific variation of this behaviour, and should test other parrots and other large-brained birds to see how this can be generalized across the class and to investigate the evolutionary history of this trait.

Dataset Information

Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini).

Publications

Social transmission of tool use and tool manufacture in Goffin cockatoos (Cacatua goffini).

Similar Datasets

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