Do capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) use tokens as symbols?

The Investigation of Prosocial Behavior in a Tool Task by Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella)

Humans are exceptional in their willingness to and frequency with which they help one another. However, nonhuman primates also exhibit prosocial behavior. Recently, a number of laboratory studies examining prosociality among primates have yielded conflicting results. These contradictory findings may be due to a reliance on human interaction, tokens, or interactions in the direct context of food...

Preference Transitivity and Symbolic Representation in Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella)

BACKGROUND Can non-human animals comprehend and employ symbols? The most convincing empirical evidence comes from language-trained apes, but little is known about this ability in monkeys. Tokens can be regarded as symbols since they are inherently non-valuable objects that acquire an arbitrarily assigned value upon exchange with an experimenter. Recent evidence suggested that capuchin monkeys, ...

Socially learned preferences for differentially rewarded tokens in the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella).

Social learning is assumed to underlie traditions, yet evidence indicating social learning in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), which exhibit traditions, is sparse. The authors tested capuchins for their ability to learn the value of novel tokens using a previously familiar token-exchange economy. Capuchins change their preferences in favor of a token worth a high-value food reward after watchin...

Social traditions and social learning in capuchin monkeys (Cebus).

Capuchin monkeys (genus Cebus) have evolutionarily converged with humans and chimpanzees in a number of ways, including large brain size, omnivory and extractive foraging, extensive cooperation and coalitionary behaviour and a reliance on social learning. Recent research has documented a richer repertoire of group-specific social conventions in the coalition-prone Cebus capucinus than in any ot...

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition Do You See What I See? A Comparative Investigation of the Delboeuf Illusion in Humans (Homo sapiens), Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta), and Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella)