ABS 2023
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Are popular monkeys smarter? The social and cognitive lives of primates
Reggie Paxton Gazes. Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, United States

Many social species live in groups structured in linear, transitive dominance hierarchies.�Theory suggests that pressures exerted by the need to learn and maintain dominance relationships were major drivers of cognitive evolution, leading to the development or refinement of many of the cognitive abilities seen in socially complex species. For example, linear dominance hierarchies can be learned and represented through cognitive processes such as transitive inference (A>B, B>C, therefore A>C) and ordinal representation (A>B>C>D>E), both of which are commonly shown by social animals. However, while dominance relationships are important to the social lives of many species, they usually make up only a fraction of day-to-day social interactions. Instead, the majority of interactions are in support of non-transitive, non-linear positive affiliative relationships, such as grooming, playing, and being near other animals. In this talk I will present data related to how animals learn and represent linear transitive relationships, such as those seen in dominance hierarchies, as well as data on affiliative social interactions and their relation to performance on cognitive tasks.