Social complexity and the information acquired during eavesdropping by primates and other animals
نویسنده
چکیده
In many of the studies reviewed in this book, eavesdropping takes the following form: a subject has the opportunity to monitor, or eavesdrop upon, an interaction between two other animals, A and B. The subject then uses the information obtained through these observations to assess A’s and B’s relative dominance or attractiveness as a mate (e.g. Mennill et al., 2002; Ch. 2). For example, Oliveira et al. (1998) found that male fighting fish Betta splendens that had witnessed two other males involved in an aggressive interaction subsequently responded more strongly to the loser of that interaction than the winner. Subjects’behaviour could not have been influenced by any inherent differences between the two males, because subjects responded equally strongly to the winner and the loser of competitive interactions they had not observed. Similarly, Peake et al. (2001) presented male great tits Parus major with the opportunity to monitor an apparent competitive interaction between two strangers by simulating a singing contest using two loudspeakers. The relative timing of the singing bouts (as measured by the degree of overlap between the two songs) provided information about each ‘contestant’s’ relative status. Following the singing interaction, one of the ‘contestants’ was introduced into the male’s territory. Males responded significantly less strongly to singers that had apparently just ‘lost’ the interaction (see also McGregor & Dabelsteen, 1996; Naguib et al., 1999; Ch. 2). What information does an individual acquire when it eavesdrops on others? In theory, an eavesdropper could acquire information of many different sorts: about A, about B, about the relationship between A and B, or about the place of
منابع مشابه
Social complexity and the information acquired during eavesdropping by primates and other animals By 10
متن کامل
Expanding the scope for social information use
Our understanding of how, why, and the circumstances under which animals use social information has been facilitated by three principal areas of research, social learning, public information use and social eavesdropping. With few exceptions, these related concepts have remained remarkably distinct within the literature, with little discussion or integration among them. Are these distinctions wa...
متن کاملSocial Eavesdropping in Zebrafish: Tuning of Attention to Social Interactions
Group living animals may eavesdrop on signalling interactions between conspecifics in order to collect adaptively relevant information obtained from others, without incurring in the costs of first-hand information acquisition. This ability (aka social eavesdropping) is expected to impact Darwinian fitness, and hence predicts the evolution of cognitive processes that enable social animals to use...
متن کاملSocial Relationships, Social Cognition, and the Evolution of Mind in Primates
In the first half of the 20th century, primate cognition was studied almost exclusively in the laboratory, with single individuals as subjects and objects of various sorts as test stimuli (see Tomasello & Call, 1997, for review). As field studies began to proliferate in the 1960s and 1970s, however, it became increasingly clear that the primate mind evolved in a complex social environment, and ...
متن کاملREDIRECTED AGGRESSION AND RECONCILIATION AMONG VERVET MONKEYS, CERCOPITHECUS AETHIOPS by
The data gathered by human observers studying the behavior of nonhuman primates often reveal a social structure of apparently striking complexity. Social groups are composed of a number of different families of different dominance ranks, each of which both competes and cooperates with other families in the group. It is often difficult for the observer to imagine that the monkeys could function ...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2004