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Author Notes:

Corresponding author Malini Suchak, suchakm@canisius.edu

Malini Suchak conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Timothy M. Eppley and Matthew W. Campbell conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Frans B.M. de Waal conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

We would like to thank Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Zanna Clay, Harold Gouzoules, Sarah Brosnan, Monica Capra, and Philippe Rochat for helpful discussions; Julia Watzek for statistical help; the Veterinary and Animal Care staff at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center for maintaining the health of our research subjects.

The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Subjects:

Research Funding:

The study was supported by the Living Links Center, Emory’s PRISM Program (NSF GK12 #DGE0536941), Emory’s Dean’s Teaching Fellowship program, Emory’s FIRST program (NIH/NIGMS(USA) IRACDA grant #K12GM00680 to MWC), the Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude Project of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California-Berkeley, and the base grant of the National Institutes of Health to the YNPRC from the National Center for Research Resources PR51RR165 (currently supported by the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs/ODP51OD11132).

Keywords:

  • Cooperation
  • Chimpanzee
  • Pan troglodytes
  • Partner choice
  • Tolerance

Ape duos and trios: spontaneous cooperation with free partner choice in chimpanzees

Tools:

Journal Title:

PeerJ

Volume:

Volume 2

Publisher:

, Pages e417-e417

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

The purpose of the present study was to push the boundaries of cooperation among captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). There has been doubt about the level of cooperation that chimpanzees are able to spontaneously achieve or understand. Would they, without any pre-training or restrictions in partner choice, be able to develop successful joint action? And would they be able to extend cooperation to more than two partners, as they do in nature? Chimpanzees were given a chance to cooperate with multiple partners of their own choosing. All members of the group (N = 11) had simultaneous access to an apparatus that required two (dyadic condition) or three (triadic condition) individuals to pull in a tray baited with food. Without any training, the chimpanzees spontaneously solved the task a total of 3,565 times in both dyadic and triadic combinations. Their success rate and efficiency increased over time, whereas the amount of pulling in the absence of a partner decreased, demonstrating that they had learned the task contingencies. They preferentially approached the apparatus when kin or nonkin of similar rank were present, showing a preference for socially tolerant partners. The forced partner combinations typical of cooperation experiments cannot reveal these abilities, which demonstrate that in the midst of a complex social environment, chimpanzees spontaneously initiate and maintain a high level of cooperative behavior.

Copyright information:

© 2014 Suchak et al.

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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