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Squirrel monkey responses to information from social demonstration and individual exploration using touchscreen and
Elizabeth Renner1, Mark Atkinson1, Christine A Caldwell1
1Psychology, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK.
Peerj
|November 14, 2019
Summary
Squirrel monkeys struggled to learn discrimination tasks, whether information was gained socially or individually. Their tendency to repeat choices, even incorrect ones, suggests limited understanding of task rules.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive ethology
- Animal behavior
Background:
- Understanding social vs. individual learning in non-human primates is crucial for comparative cognition.
- Squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus) are widely used models, but their learning capabilities require further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if squirrel monkeys exhibit differential responses to information acquired socially versus individually.
- To assess squirrel monkeys' ability to learn binary discrimination tasks under different information acquisition conditions.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments using touchscreen and physical object choice tasks to present binary discrimination problems.
- Exposure to either social information (demonstrator) or individual exploration for initial learning.
- Analysis of spontaneous responses to social-win, social-lose, individual-win, and individual-lose trials.
Main Results:
- Squirrel monkeys demonstrated significant difficulty mastering the discrimination tasks across both experimental setups.
- A general tendency to repeat choices from the information trial was observed, irrespective of outcome (win/lose) or information source (social/individual).
- Apparent success was likely due to behavioral inertia and stimulus enhancement, not rule learning.
Conclusions:
- Squirrel monkeys' poor performance was attributed to difficulties with task structure, not the presentation medium (touchscreen vs. object choice).
- Neither touchscreen nor physical object choice tasks provided a performance advantage, indicating their validity for studying learning in this species.
- The studied population of squirrel monkeys did not master the task contingencies, highlighting limitations in their ability to learn these specific discriminations.
