Résultat de la recherche
Community-specific evaluation of tool affordances in wild chimpanzees
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. Secondly, when the alternative function was made more salient, chimpanzees were unable to learn it, suggesting that prior cultural background can interfere with new learning. Culture appears to shape how chimpanzees see the world, suggesting that a cognitive component underlies the observed behavioural patterns.
Community-specific evaluation of tool affordances in wild chimpanzees
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. Secondly, when the alternative function was made more salient, chimpanzees were unable to learn it, suggesting that prior cultural background can interfere with new learning. Culture appears to shape how chimpanzees see the world, suggesting that a cognitive component underlies the observed behavioural patterns.
The knowns and unknowns of chimpanzee culture
Claims of culture in chimpanzees appeared soon after the launch of the first field studies in Africa. The notion of chimpanzee ‘material cultures’ was coined, and this was followed by a first formal comparison, which revealed an astonishing degree of behavioural diversity between the different study communities, mainly in terms of tool use. Although this behavioural diversity is still undisputed, the question of chimpanzee cultures has remained controversial. The debate has less to do with the definition of culture (most animal behaviour researchers accept the notion for behaviour that is ‘transmitted repeatedly through social or observational learning to become a population-level characteristic’), but more with whether some key criteria are met.