Behavioural Ecology and Self-Organization, Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2012;7(5):e37271. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037271. Epub 2012 May 30.
Complex social behaviour of primates has usually been attributed to the operation of complex cognition. Recently, models have shown that constraints imposed by the socio-spatial structuring of individuals in a group may result in an unexpectedly high number of patterns of complex social behaviour, resembling the dominance styles of egalitarian and despotic species of macaques and the differences between them. This includes affiliative patterns, such as reciprocation of grooming, grooming up the hierarchy, and reconciliation. In the present study, we show that the distribution of support in fights, which is the social behaviour that is potentially most sophisticated in terms of cognitive processes, may emerge in the same way. The model represents the spatial grouping of individuals and their social behaviour, such as their avoidance of risks during attacks, the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing their fights, their tendency to join in fights of others that are close by (social facilitation), their tendency to groom when they are anxious, the reduction of their anxiety by grooming, and the increase of anxiety when involved in aggression. Further, we represent the difference in intensity of aggression apparent in egalitarian and despotic macaques. The model reproduces many aspects of support in fights, such as its different types, namely, conservative, bridging and revolutionary, patterns of choice of coalition partners attributed to triadic awareness, those of reciprocation of support and 'spiteful acts' and of exchange between support and grooming. This work is important because it suggests that behaviour that seems to result from sophisticated cognition may be a side-effect of spatial structure and dominance interactions and it shows that partial correlations fail to completely omit these effects of spatial structure. Further, the model is falsifiable, since it results in many patterns that can easily be tested in real primates by means of existing data.
灵长类动物复杂的社会行为通常归因于复杂认知的运作。最近，模型表明，个体在群体中的社会空间结构所施加的约束可能导致复杂社会行为模式的数量出乎意料地增加，类似于平等主义和专制猕猴物种的支配风格及其之间的差异。这包括亲和模式，例如互惠梳理、在等级制度上梳理和和解。在本研究中，我们表明，战斗中的支持分布可能以同样的方式出现，这是一种在认知过程方面可能最复杂的社会行为。该模型代表了个体的空间分组及其社会行为，例如在攻击期间避免风险、赢得和输掉战斗的自我强化效应、他们倾向于加入附近的其他人的战斗（社会促进）、当他们焦虑时梳理的倾向、梳理减少他们的焦虑以及参与攻击时增加焦虑。此外，我们还表示了平等主义和专制猕猴中明显的攻击强度差异。该模型再现了战斗中支持的许多方面，例如其不同类型，即保守、桥接和革命，归因于三方意识的联盟伙伴选择模式，支持的互惠和“恶意行为”以及支持和梳理之间的交换模式。这项工作很重要，因为它表明似乎源于复杂认知的行为可能是空间结构和支配相互作用的副作用，并且表明偏相关不能完全排除这些空间结构的影响。此外，该模型是可证伪的，因为它产生了许多模式，这些模式可以通过现有的数据很容易地在真实的灵长类动物中进行测试。
