Sinha A
National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR Centre, Bangalore, India.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1998 Apr 29;353(1368):619-31. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1998.0230.
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 hierarchy and affiliative networks. Triadic interactions offer 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 differences 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 influenced more by her knowledge of her rank difference with both the other interactants, rather than by their absolute ranks. Moreover, information about social attractiveness 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.
发展和维持复杂社会关系的压力可能导致许多非人类灵长类动物认知能力的进化。尤其是了解其他个体的优势等级和社会关系，对于评估自己在等级制度和亲和网络中的地位很重要。三元互动为检验个体是否基于此类知识做出决策提供了绝佳机会。野生雌性冠毛猕猴（食蟹猴）之间的互相梳理毛发替代行为通常涉及梳理毛发二元组中的从属雌性，在占主导地位的雌性接近二元组的两个成员时撤退。然而，在少数特殊情况下，二元组中的主导成员会撤退；涉及二元组等级差异和争斗关系的简单非认知假设无法解释这一现象。相反，主导个体的撤退与她从属同伴的社会吸引力呈正相关（通过后者从群体中其他雌性那里接受梳理毛发的持续时间来衡量）。这表明个体不仅会评估其他雌性之间的关系，而且会基于她们接受梳理毛发的数量来进行评估。同样，当任何雌性是二元组中的主导成员时，她收到接近行为的频率与她的社会吸引力相关，但当她是从属成员时则不然。这表明接近的雌性可能意识到了两个互相梳理毛发个体的相对优势等级。在逻辑回归分析中，发现任何个体撤退的概率更多地受到她对自己与其他两个互动者等级差异的了解影响，而不是受他们的绝对等级影响。此外，关于社会吸引力的信息似乎是根据相关的优势等级来使用的。因此，冠毛猕猴雌性所获得的知识的性质可能是以自我为中心的，即相对于自己来评估其他个体；是综合的，即同时使用关于所有其他互动者的信息；并且是分层的，即在优先使用某些类别的知识来存储来自其他领域的相关信息方面具有能力。
