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Byrne, R. W. (2007). Culture in great apes: using intricate complexity in feeding skills to trace the evolutionary origin of human technical prowess. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 362(1480), 577–585.
Abstract: Geographical cataloguing of traits, as used in human ethnography, has led to the description of “culture” in some non-human great apes. Culture, in these terms, is detected as a pattern of local ignorance resulting from environmental constraints on knowledge transmission. However, in many cases, the geographical variations may alternatively be explained by ecology. Social transmission of information can reliably be identified in many other animal species, by experiment or distinctive patterns in distribution; but the excitement of detecting culture in great apes derives from the possibility of understanding the evolution of cumulative technological culture in humans. Given this interest, I argue that great ape research should concentrate on technically complex behaviour patterns that are ubiquitous within a local population; in these cases, a wholly non-social ontogeny is highly unlikely. From this perspective, cultural transmission has an important role in the elaborate feeding skills of all species of great ape, in conveying the “gist” or organization of skills. In contrast, social learning is unlikely to be responsible for local stylistic differences, which are apt to reflect sensitive adaptations to ecology.
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Emery, N. J., Seed, A. M., von Bayern, A. M. P., & Clayton, N. S. (2007). Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in birds. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 362(1480), 489–505.
Abstract: The “social intelligence hypothesis” was originally conceived to explain how primates may have evolved their superior intellect and large brains when compared with other animals. Although some birds such as corvids may be intellectually comparable to apes, the same relationship between sociality and brain size seen in primates has not been found for birds, possibly suggesting a role for other non-social factors. But bird sociality is different from primate sociality. Most monkeys and apes form stable groups, whereas most birds are monogamous, and only form large flocks outside of the breeding season. Some birds form lifelong pair bonds and these species tend to have the largest brains relative to body size. Some of these species are known for their intellectual abilities (e.g. corvids and parrots), while others are not (e.g. geese and albatrosses). Although socio-ecological factors may explain some of the differences in brain size and intelligence between corvids/parrots and geese/albatrosses, we predict that the type and quality of the bonded relationship is also critical. Indeed, we present empirical evidence that rook and jackdaw partnerships resemble primate and dolphin alliances. Although social interactions within a pair may seem simple on the surface, we argue that cognition may play an important role in the maintenance of long-term relationships, something we name as “relationship intelligence”.
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Mithen, S. (2007). Did farming arise from a misapplication of social intelligence? Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 362(1480), 705–718.
Abstract: The origins of farming is the defining event of human history – the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans. With the economic basis provided by farming, human individuals and societies have developed types of material culture that greatly augment powers of memory and computation, extending the human mental capacity far beyond that which the brain alone can provide. Archaeologists have long debated and discussed why people began living in settled communities and became dependent on cultivated plants and animals, which soon evolved into domesticated forms. One of the most intriguing explanations was proposed more than 20 years ago not by an archaeologist but by a psychologist: Nicholas Humphrey suggested that farming arose from the “misapplication of social intelligence”. I explore this idea in relation to recent discoveries and archaeological interpretations in the Near East, arguing that social intelligence has indeed played a key role in the origin of farming and hence the emergence of the modern world.
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Call, J. (2003). Beyond learning fixed rules and social cues: abstraction in the social arena. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 358(1435), 1189–1196.
Abstract: Abstraction is a central idea in many areas of physical comparative cognition such as categorization, numerical competence or problem solving. This idea, however, has rarely been applied to comparative social cognition. In this paper, I propose that the notion of abstraction can be applied to the social arena and become an important tool to investigate the social cognition and behaviour processes in animals. To make this point, I present recent evidence showing that chimpanzees know about what others can see and about what others intend. These data do not fit either low-level mechanisms based on stimulus-response associations or high-level explanations based on metarepresentational mechanisms such as false belief attribution. Instead, I argue that social abstraction, in particular the development of concepts such as seeing in others, is key to explaining the behaviour of our closest relative in a variety of situations.
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Giraldeau, L. - A., Valone, T., J., & Templeton, J., J. (2002). Potential disadvantages of using socially acquired information. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 357(1427), 1559–1566.
Abstract: The acquisition and use of socially acquired information is commonly assumed to be profitable. We challenge this assumption by exploring hypothetical scenarios where the use of such information either provides no benefit or can actually be costly. First, we show that the level of incompatibility between the acquisition of personal and socially acquired information will directly affect the extent to which the use of socially acquired information can be profitable. When these two sources of information cannot be acquired simultaneously, there may be no benefit to socially acquired information. Second, we assume that a solitary individual's behavioural decisions will be based on cues revealed by its own interactions with the environment. However, in many cases, for social animals the only socially acquired information available to individuals is the behavioural actions of others that expose their decisions, rather than the cues on which these decisions were based. We argue that in such a situation the use of socially acquired information can lead to informational cascades that sometimes result in sub-optimal behaviour. From this theory of informational cascades, we predict that when erroneous cascades are costly, individuals should pay attention only to socially generated cues and not behavioural decisions. We suggest three scenarios that might be examples of informational cascades in nature.
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Valone, Thomas J., & Templeton, J. J. (2002). Public information for the assessment of quality: a widespread social phenomenon. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 357(1427), 1549–1557.
Abstract: We propose that the use of public information about the quality of environmental resources, obtained by monitoring the sampling behaviour of others, may be a widespread social phenomenon allowing individuals to make faster, more accurate assessments of their environment. To demonstrate this (i) we define public information and distinguish it from other kinds of social information; (ii) we review empirical work demonstrating the benefits and costs of using public information to estimate food patch quality; (iii) we examine recent work showing that individuals may also be using public information to improve their estimates of the quality of such disparate environmental parameters as breeding patches, opponents and mates; and finally (iv) we suggest avenues of future work to better understand the nature of public information use and when it might be used or ignored. Such work should lead to a more complete understanding of the behaviour of individuals in social aggregations.
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Brennan, P. A., & Kendrick, K. M. (2006). Mammalian social odours: attraction and individual recognition. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 361(1476), 2061–2078.
Abstract: Mammalian social systems rely on signals passed between individuals conveying information including sex, reproductive status, individual identity, ownership, competitive ability and health status. Many of these signals take the form of complex mixtures of molecules sensed by chemosensory systems and have important influences on a variety of behaviours that are vital for reproductive success, such as parent-offspring attachment, mate choice and territorial marking. This article aims to review the nature of these chemosensory cues and the neural pathways mediating their physiological and behavioural effects. Despite the complexities of mammalian societies, there are instances where single molecules can act as classical pheromones attracting interest and approach behaviour. Chemosignals with relatively high volatility can be used to signal at a distance and are sensed by the main olfactory system. Most mammals also possess a vomeronasal system, which is specialized to detect relatively non-volatile chemosensory cues following direct contact. Single attractant molecules are sensed by highly specific receptors using a labelled line pathway. These act alongside more complex mixtures of signals that are required to signal individual identity. There are multiple sources of such individuality chemosignals, based on the highly polymorphic genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) or lipocalins such as the mouse major urinary proteins. The individual profile of volatile components that make up an individual odour signature can be sensed by the main olfactory system, as the pattern of activity across an array of broadly tuned receptor types. In addition, the vomeronasal system can respond highly selectively to non-volatile peptide ligands associated with the MHC, acting at the V2r class of vomeronasal receptor.The ability to recognize individuals or their genetic relatedness plays an important role in mammalian social behaviour. Thus robust systems for olfactory learning and recognition of chemosensory individuality have evolved, often associated with major life events, such as mating, parturition or neonatal development. These forms of learning share common features, such as increased noradrenaline evoked by somatosensory stimulation, which results in neural changes at the level of the olfactory bulb. In the main olfactory bulb, these changes are likely to refine the pattern of activity in response to the learned odour, enhancing its discrimination from those of similar odours. In the accessory olfactory bulb, memory formation is hypothesized to involve a selective inhibition, which disrupts the transmission of the learned chemosignal from the mating male. Information from the main olfactory and vomeronasal systems is integrated at the level of the corticomedial amygdala, which forms the most important pathway by which social odours mediate their behavioural and physiological effects. Recent evidence suggests that this region may also play an important role in the learning and recognition of social chemosignals.
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Broad, K. D., Curley, J. P., & Keverne, E. B. (2006). Mother-infant bonding and the evolution of mammalian social relationships. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 361(1476), 2199–2214.
Abstract: A wide variety of maternal, social and sexual bonding strategies have been described across mammalian species, including humans. Many of the neural and hormonal mechanisms that underpin the formation and maintenance of these bonds demonstrate a considerable degree of evolutionary conservation across a representative range of these species. However, there is also a considerable degree of diversity in both the way these mechanisms are activated and in the behavioural responses that result. In the majority of small-brained mammals (including rodents), the formation of a maternal or partner preference bond requires individual recognition by olfactory cues, activation of neural mechanisms concerned with social reward by these cues and gender-specific hormonal priming for behavioural output. With the evolutionary increase of neocortex seen in monkeys and apes, there has been a corresponding increase in the complexity of social relationships and bonding strategies together with a significant redundancy in hormonal priming for motivated behaviour. Olfactory recognition and olfactory inputs to areas of the brain concerned with social reward are downregulated and recognition is based on integration of multimodal sensory cues requiring an expanded neocortex, particularly the association cortex. This emancipation from olfactory and hormonal determinants of bonding has been succeeded by the increased importance of social learning that is necessitated by living in a complex social world and, especially in humans, a world that is dominated by cultural inheritance. © 2006 The Royal Society.
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Dyer, J. R. G., Johansson, A., Helbing, D., Couzin, I. D., & Krause, J. (2009). Leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 364(1518), 781–789.
Abstract: This paper reviews the literature on leadership in vertebrate groups, including recent work on human groups, before presenting the results of three new experiments looking at leadership and decision making in small and large human groups. In experiment 1, we find that both group size and the presence of uninformed individuals can affect the speed with which small human groups (eight people) decide between two opposing directional preferences and the likelihood of the group splitting. In experiment 2, we show that the spatial positioning of informed individuals within small human groups (10 people) can affect the speed and accuracy of group motion. We find that having a mixture of leaders positioned in the centre and on the edge of a group increases the speed and accuracy with which the group reaches their target. In experiment 3, we use large human crowds (100 and 200 people) to demonstrate that the trends observed from earlier work using small human groups can be applied to larger crowds. We find that only a small minority of informed individuals is needed to guide a large uninformed group. These studies build upon important theoretical and empirical work on leadership and decision making in animal groups.
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Sumpter, D. J. T. (2006). The principles of collective animal behaviour. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 361(1465), 5–22.
Abstract: In recent years, the concept of self-organization has been used to understand collective behaviour of animals. The central tenet of self-organization is that simple repeated interactions between individuals can produce complex adaptive patterns at the level of the group. Inspiration comes from patterns seen in physical systems, such as spiralling chemical waves, which arise without complexity at the level of the individual units of which the system is composed. The suggestion is that biological structures such as termite mounds, ant trail networks and even human crowds can be explained in terms of repeated interactions between the animals and their environment, without invoking individual complexity. Here, I review cases in which the self-organization approach has been successful in explaining collective behaviour of animal groups and societies. Ant pheromone trail networks, aggregation of cockroaches, the applause of opera audiences and the migration of fish schools have all been accurately described in terms of individuals following simple sets of rules. Unlike the simple units composing physical systems, however, animals are themselves complex entities, and other examples of collective behaviour, such as honey bee foraging with its myriad of dance signals and behavioural cues, cannot be fully understood in terms of simple individuals alone. I argue that the key to understanding collective behaviour lies in identifying the principles of the behavioural algorithms followed by individual animals and of how information flows between the animals. These principles, such as positive feedback, response thresholds and individual integrity, are repeatedly observed in very different animal societies. The future of collective behaviour research lies in classifying these principles, establishing the properties they produce at a group level and asking why they have evolved in so many different and distinct natural systems. Ultimately, this research could inform not only our understanding of animal societies, but also the principles by which we organize our own society.
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