Sinha, Anindya
(1998)
Knowledge acquired and decisions made: triadic interactions during allogrooming in wild bonnet macaques, Macaca radiata.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 353 (1368).
pp. 619-631.
| Abstract: |
The pressures of developing and maintaining intricate social relationships may have led to the evolution of
enhanced cognitive abilities in many nonhuman primates. Knowledge of the dominance ranks and social
relationships of other individuals, in particular, is important in evaluating one's position in the rank hier-
archy and a¤liative networks. Triadic interactions o¡er an excellent opportunity to examine whether
decisions are taken by individuals on the basis of such knowledge. Allogrooming supplants among wild
female bonnet macaques (Macaca radiata) usually involved the subordinate female of a grooming dyad
retreating at the approach of a female dominant to both members of the dyad. In a few exceptional cases,
however, the dominant member of the dyad retreated ; simple non- cognitive hypotheses involving dyadic
rank di¡erences and agonistic relationships failed to explain this phenomenon. Instead, retreat by the
dominant individual was positively correlated with the social attractiveness of her subordinate companion
(as measured by the duration of grooming received by the latter from other females in the troop). This
suggests that not only does an individual evaluate relationships among other females, but does so on the
basis of the amount of grooming received by them. Similarly, the frequency of approaches received by any
female was correlated with her social attractiveness when she was the dominant member of the dyad, but
not when she was the subordinate. This indicated that approaching females might be aware of the relative
dominance ranks of the two allogrooming individuals. In logistic regression analyses, the probability of any
individual retreating was found to be in£uenced more by her knowledge of her rank di¡erence with both
the other interactants, rather than by their absolute ranks. Moreover, information about social attractive -
ness appeared to be used in terms of correlated dominance ranks. The nature of knowledge acquired by
bonnet macaque females may thus be egotistical in that other individuals are evaluated relative to
oneself, integrative in that information about all other interactants is used simultaneously, and hierarchical
in the ability to preferentially use certain categories of knowledge for the storage of related information
from other domains.
|
| Item Type: |
Journal Paper
|
| Additional Information: |
The Copyright belongs to Royal Society. |
| Keywords: |
social knowledge;bonnet macaque;allogrooming;social cognition; Macaca radiata |
| Subjects: |
School of Natural and Engineering Sciences > Animal Behaviour |
| Date Deposited: |
19 May 2006 |
| Last Modified: |
07 Jul 2007 15:49 |
| Official URL: |
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=rq3... |
| Related URLs: |
|
| Funders: |
UNSPECIFIED |
| Projects: |
UNSPECIFIED |
| DOI: |
10.1098/rstb.1998.0230 |
| URI: |
http://eprints.nias.res.in/id/eprint/67 |
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