Dataset Information

Gorillas' (Gorilla g. gorilla) knowledge of conspecifics' affordances: intraspecific social tool use for food acquisition.

ABSTRACT: The use of tools, long thought to be uniquely human, has now been observed in other animal taxa including several species of birds, non-primate mammals as well as some non-human primate species. Chimpanzees, one of humankind's closest living relatives, exceed all other non-human animal species as they have been reported to use an exceptionally large toolkit. However, relatively little is known about the tool-use skills of the other great ape species. While the majority of tools described are inanimate objects, the use of social tools has received relatively little attention. Here we provide the first evidence of naturally occurring spontaneous exploitative behaviour of a conspecific as a social tool for food acquisition in non-human animals. We observed gorillas in captivity utilising a conspecific as a ladder to gain access to unreachable food. We discuss our findings in the light of other studies on social tool use and suggest the need for more nuanced interpretations of gorillas' cognitive skills.

SUBMITTER: Prieur J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7347707 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Gorillas' (Gorilla g. gorilla) knowledge of conspecifics' affordances: intraspecific social tool use for food acquisition.

Prieur Jacques J Pika Simone S

Primates; journal of primatology 20200312 4

The use of tools, long thought to be uniquely human, has now been observed in other animal taxa including several species of birds, non-primate mammals as well as some non-human primate species. Chimpanzees, one of humankind's closest living relatives, exceed all other non-human animal species as they have been reported to use an exceptionally large toolkit. However, relatively little is known about the tool-use skills of the other great ape species. While the majority of tools described are ina ...[more]

PMID: 32166437

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Project description:Self-awareness has most commonly been studied in nonhuman animals by implementing mirror self-recognition (MSR) tasks. The validity of such tasks as a stand-alone method has, however, been debated due to their high interindividual variation (including in species deemed self-aware like chimpanzees), their reliance on only one sensory modality, their discrete outcomes (i.e., pass/fail) and, in general, questionned regarding their ability to assess self-awareness. Therefore, a greater variety of methods that assess different aspects of the self, while simultaneously contributing to a more gradualist view of self-awareness, would be desirable. One such method is the body-as-obstacle task (BAO), testing for another dimension of body self-awareness. The ability to understand one's own body as an obstacle to the completion of a desired action emerges in young children at approximately the same age as mirror self-recognition, suggesting a shared mental representation. Whereas recently some studies showed body self-awareness in nonhuman animals, so far, outside of children no studies have compared how the performances of individuals relate between these two tasks. Therefore, here we study both a MSR and a BAO task in chimpanzees and gorillas. We chose these species particularly because evidence for MSR in chimpanzees is well established, whereas results for gorillas have been mixed, which has been attributed to the study design of MSR tasks, and for which a BAO task might thus provide more conclusive evidence. We find that although only some chimpanzees showed evidence for mirror self-recognition, thus replicating previous findings on interspecies differences in MSR, chimpanzees and gorillas performed equally well in the BAO task. Yet, we further found no correlation between the individuals' performances in both tasks. We discuss the implications of these findings for the interpretation of the results of BAO tasks as a possible alternative paradigm for the study of self-awareness in non-human animals.

Dataset Information

Gorillas' (Gorilla g. gorilla) knowledge of conspecifics' affordances: intraspecific social tool use for food acquisition.

Publications

Gorillas' (Gorilla g. gorilla) knowledge of conspecifics' affordances: intraspecific social tool use for food acquisition.

Similar Datasets

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