Zuberbühler, Klaus

2016-5-1, Coye, Camille, Zuberbühler, Klaus, Lemasson, Alban

2016-2-21, Kühl, Hjalmar S, Zuberbühler, Klaus

2015-7-14, Briefer, Sabrina, Zuberbühler, Klaus, Bardou, D, Briefer, Elodie, Bruckmaier, R, Fouché, N, Fleury, J, Maigrot, A, Ramseyer, A

2015, Crockford, Catherine, Deschner, Tobias, Ziegler, Toni, Zuberbühler, Klaus, Wittig, Roman

2016-4-2, Mugisha, Steven, Zuberbühler, Klaus, Hobaiter, Cat

2016, Bshary, Redouan, Zuberbühler, Klaus, van Schaik, Carel P.

Mutual helping for direct benefits can be explained by various game theoretical models, which differ mainly in terms of the underlying conflict of interest between two partners. Conflict is minimal if helping is self-serving and the partner benefits as a by-product. In contrast, conflict is maximal if partners are in a prisoner's dilemma with both having the pay-off-dominant option of not returning the other's investment. Here, we provide evolutionary and ecological arguments for why these two extremes are often unstable under natural conditions and propose that interactions with intermediate levels of conflict are frequent evolutionary endpoints. We argue that by-product helping is prone to becoming an asymmetric investment game since even small variation in by-product benefits will lead to the evolution of partner choice, leading to investments by the chosen class. Second, iterated prisoner's dilemmas tend to take place in stable social groups where the fitness of partners is interdependent, with the effect that a certain level of helping is self-serving. In sum, intermediate levels of mutual helping are expected in nature, while efficient partner monitoring may allow reaching higher levels.

2015-4-1, Candiotti, Agnes, Coye, Camille, Ouattara, Karim, Petit, Eric, Vallet, D, Zuberbühler, Klaus

2016-3-15, Fallon, Brittany, Neumann, Christof, Byrne, Richard W, Zuberbühler, Klaus

2016, Schlenker, Philippe, Chemla, Emmanuel, Arnold, Kate, Zuberbühler, Klaus

Male Putty-nosed monkeys have two main alarm calls, pyows and hacks. While pyows have a broad distribution suggestive of a general call, hacks are often indicative of eagles. In a series of articles, Arnold and Zuberbuhler showed that Putty-nosed monkeys sometimes produce distinct pyow-hack sequences made of a small number of pyows followed by a small number of hacks; and that these are predictive of group movement. Arnold and Zuberbuhler claimed that pyow-hack sequences are syntactically combinatorial but not semantically compositional because their meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of their component parts. We compare two theories of this phenomenon. One formalizes and modifies the non-compositional theory. The other presents a semantically compositional alternative based on weak meanings for pyow ('general alarm') and hack (non-ground movement'), combined with pragmatic principles of competition; a crucial one is an 'Urgency Principle' whereby calls that provide information about the nature/location of a threat must come before calls that do not. Semantically, pyow-hack sequences are compatible with any kind of situation involving (moving) aerial predators or (arboreal) movement of the monkeys themselves. But in the former case, hacks provide information about the location of a threat, and hence should appear at the beginning of sequences. As a result, pyow-hack sequences can only be used for non-threat related situations involving movement, hence a possible inference that they involve group movement. Without adjudicating the debate, we argue that a formal analysis can help clarify competing theories and derive new predictions that might decide between them. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.

2015, Mercier, Stéphanie, Van De Waal, Erica, Zuberbühler, Klaus