PSYCH 450 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Miguel Nicolelis, Japanese Macaque, Gordon G. Gallup
04/12/18 lecture 20: Protoculture and tool use
• Can monkeys play video games?
o Similar to 3-6 yr child
o Not as good as 11-23 yr old in navigating the shortest distance to the goal
• Miguel Nicolelis
o Control avatar image on screen robot with neuronal firing
• But are there other important aspects of intelligence?
o anomalies/expectations
▪ Squirrel monkeys, gibbons
▪ Why are capuchins above average?
▪ Other smart animals: racoons, parrots
o Training (is it really Clever Hans again?)
• Many other kinds of intelligence
o Species-typical behavior
▪ Nest building, hunting, medicinal plant use
o Tool use
▪ Orangutans making umbrellas
o City monkeys were better at experiments than wild monkeys
• Imo, juvenile female Japanese macaque
o Potato and wheat washing on the island of Koshima (1956)
o Take home message: what was the first demonstration that a new behavior
incorporated into the normal repertoire and get passed on from one generation
to the next to the next
• Termite fishing and ant-dipping in chimpanzees
o Age when tool use observed in male and female juvenile chimpanzees (graph)
• Development of stone-tool use in chimpanzee
o About 3-4 years of age begin
o Learned behavior passed on
• Imitation or purposeful learning?
• Archaic stone tools from earlier chimpanzees (4300 years old)
o Were curious how long have been doing this so did archaeological study
o Chimpanzees have been using rocks to open nuts for 4300 years
• Old capuchin stone tools
o Capucins in this part of Brazil have been pounding cashews for 600-700 years
• One island macaques eat mussels, others do’t
o Compared island where used rocks vs other island where bite through them
o Overexploitation of mussels and mussels were smaller in size compared to ones
where they bit into them
• Study to study cultural transmission
o Taught them that eating blue food was okay, not pink
o But taught others the opposite
o Kids follow their parents/what the adult females were doing
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