Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
Am J Primatol. 2011 Aug;73(8):720-30. doi: 10.1002/ajp.20949. Epub 2011 Mar 23.
Advances over the last 15 years have made social network analysis (SNA) a powerful tool for the study of nonhuman primate social behavior. Although many SNA-based techniques have been only very recently adopted in primatological research, others have been commonly used by primatologists for decades. The roots of SNA also stem from some of the same conceptual frameworks as the majority of nonhuman primate behavioral research. The rapid development of SNA in recent years has led to questions within the primatological community of where and how SNA fits within this field. We aim to address these questions by providing an overview of the historical relationship between SNA and the study of nonhuman primates. We begin with a brief history of the development of SNA, followed by a detailed description of the network-based visualization techniques, analytical methods and conceptual frameworks which have been employed by primatologists since as early as the 1960s. We also introduce some of the latest advances to SNA, thereby demonstrating that this approach contains novel tools for the study of nonhuman primate social behavior which may be used to shed light on questions that cannot be addressed fully using more conventional methods.
在过去的 15 年中，社会网络分析（SNA）已经成为研究非人类灵长类动物社会行为的有力工具。尽管许多基于 SNA 的技术最近才被应用于灵长类动物学研究，但其他技术已经被灵长类动物学家使用了几十年。SNA 的起源也源于与大多数非人类灵长类动物行为研究相同的概念框架。近年来，SNA 的快速发展使得灵长类动物学界内部产生了一些疑问，即 SNA 在该领域中的位置和应用方式。我们旨在通过概述 SNA 与非人类灵长类动物研究之间的历史关系来回答这些问题。我们首先简要介绍 SNA 的发展历史，然后详细描述自 20 世纪 60 年代以来灵长类动物学家就已经采用的基于网络的可视化技术、分析方法和概念框架。我们还介绍了 SNA 的一些最新进展，从而表明这种方法为研究非人类灵长类动物的社会行为提供了新颖的工具，这些工具可以用来解决仅使用更传统方法无法完全解决的问题。
