León Julián, Thiriau Constance, Bodin Clémentine, Crockford Catherine, Zuberbühler Klaus
Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, 2000 Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Taï Monkey Project, Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques, 01 BP1303 Abidjan 01, Cote d'Ivoire.
iScience. 2022 Aug 5;25(9):104853. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104853. eCollection 2022 Sep 16.
How do animals learn to classify the world and what is the role of social learning during this process? Here, we show that young sooty mangabeys, , of Taï Forest, Côte d'Ivoire, learn to rapidly classify an unfamiliar predator by attending to others' alarm calls and that such knowledge is retained over long periods. We experimentally exposed subjects to chimeric predator models with both snake- and leopard-like features, combined with playbacks of conspecific snake (N = 12) or leopard alarms (N = 13). Adults classified the chimeras as non-threatening but for juveniles, we found that one single alarm call exposure was sufficient to allocate the chimera to the snake or leopard category, suggesting plausibility judgments in experienced adults. We then retested N = 10 juveniles with the same models more than a year after their first experience and found that they continued to show their original response, indicating long-term retention of socially learned predator categorisation.
动物如何学会对世界进行分类，以及在这个过程中社会学习起到了什么作用？在这里，我们表明，来自科特迪瓦塔伊森林的年轻黑冠猕猴通过关注其他同类的警报叫声，学会快速对不熟悉的捕食者进行分类，并且这种知识能长期保留。我们通过实验让受试猕猴接触具有蛇和豹特征的嵌合捕食者模型，并播放同种蛇（N = 12）或豹的警报声（N = 13）。成年猕猴将这些嵌合体归类为无威胁的，但对于幼年猕猴，我们发现单次警报声暴露就足以将嵌合体归为蛇类或豹类，这表明有经验的成年猕猴会进行合理性判断。然后，我们在首次接触一年多后，用相同模型对N = 10只幼年猕猴进行重新测试，发现它们继续表现出最初的反应，这表明社会学习的捕食者分类能长期保留。
