Abstract: We tested for social learning and imitation in common marmosets using an artificial foraging task and trained conspecific demonstrators. We trained a demonstrator marmoset to open an artificial fruit, providing a full demonstration of the task to be learned. Another marmoset provided a partial demonstration, controlling for stimulus enhancement effects, by eating food from the outside of the apparatus. We thus compared three observer groups, each consisting of four animals: those that received the full demonstration, those that received the partial demonstration, and a control group that saw no demonstration prior to testing. Although none of the observer marmosets succeeded in opening the artificial fruit during the test periods, there were clear effects of demonstration type. Those that saw the full demonstration manipulated the apparatus more overall, whereas those from the control group manipulated it the least of the three groups. Those from the full-demonstration group also contacted the particular parts of the artificial fruit that they had seen touched (localised stimulus enhancement) to a greater extent than the other two groups. There was also an interaction between the number of hand and mouth touches made to the artificial fruit for the full- and partial-demonstration groups. Whether or not these data represent evidence for imitation is discussed. We also propose that the clear differences between the groups suggest that social learning mechanisms provide real benefits to these animals in terms of developing novel food-processing skills analogous to the one presented here.

Abstract: We review socially biased learning about food and problem solving in monkeys, relying especially on studies with tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) and callitrichid monkeys. Capuchin monkeys most effectively learn to solve a new problem when they can act jointly with an experienced partner in a socially tolerant setting and when the problem can be solved by direct action on an object or substrate, but they do not learn by imitation. Capuchin monkeys are motivated to eat foods, whether familiar or novel, when they are with others that are eating, regardless of what the others are eating. Thus, social bias in learning about foods is indirect and mediated by facilitation of feeding. In most respects, social biases in learning are similar in capuchins and callitrichids, except that callitrichids provide more specific behavioral cues to others about the availability and palatability of foods. Callitrichids generally are more tolerant toward group members and coordinate their activity in space and time more closely than capuchins do. These characteristics support stronger social biases in learning in callitrichids than in capuchins in some situations. On the other hand, callitrichids' more limited range of manipulative behaviors, greater neophobia, and greater sensitivity to the risk of predation restricts what these monkeys learn in comparison with capuchins. We suggest that socially biased learning is always the collective outcome of interacting physical, social, and individual factors, and that differences across populations and species in social bias in learning reflect variations in all these dimensions. Progress in understanding socially biased learning in nonhuman species will be aided by the development of appropriately detailed models of the richly interconnected processes affecting learning.

Abstract: Preference trials were conducted with mature ponies. In Trial 1, oats were compared with oats plus sucrose. Four of six pony geldings selected oats plus sucrose, but one pony demonstrated a dislike for sucrose and one selected from the bucket on the right side regardless of content. Oats, maize, barley, rye and wheat were compared in Trial 2 using six mature pony mares. Oats were the preferred grain, with maize and barley ranking second and third respectively. Wheat and rye were the least preferred. Even though the ponies demonstrated preference, the total intake at a given meal was not greatly depressed when only the less palatable grains were fed. In Trial 3, pony mares selected a diet containing 20 per cent dried distillers' grain and 80 per cent of a basal mixed diet of maize, oats, wheat bran, soybean meal, limestone and molasses over 100 per cent basal mixed diet, but selected the basal diet over diets containing 20 per cent blood meal, beet pulp or meat and bone meal and 80 per cent basal diet. They did not differentiate against diets containing 20 per cent alfalfa meal or 10 or 5 per cent meat and bone meal when the diets were compared to the basal mixed diet.

Abstract: Humans are consciously aware of some memories and can make verbal reports about these memories. Other memories cannot be brought to consciousness, even though they influence behavior. This conspicuous difference in access to memories is central in taxonomies of human memory systems but has been difficult to document in animal studies, suggesting that some forms of memory may be unique to humans. Here I show that rhesus macaque monkeys can report the presence or absence of memory. Although it is probably impossible to document subjective, conscious properties of memory in nonverbal animals, this result objectively demonstrates an important functional parallel with human conscious memory. Animals able to discern the presence and absence of memory should improve accuracy if allowed to decline memory tests when they have forgotten, and should decline tests most frequently when memory is attenuated experimentally. One of two monkeys examined unequivocally met these criteria under all test conditions, whereas the second monkey met them in all but one case. Probe tests were used to rule out “cueing” by a wide variety of environmental and behavioral stimuli, leaving detection of the absence of memory per se as the most likely mechanism underlying the monkeys' abilities to selectively decline memory tests when they had forgotten.