April 12, 2012 In many animal species, behaviours and strategies
are passed on from individuals to their conspecifics and
potentially across groups by social learning. In chimpanzees and
orangutans, whose behavioural repertoires differ from population
to population, knowledge is also "transmitted" amongst
individuals. In their current paper, researchers Daniel Haun,
Yvonne Rekers and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institutes
for Evolutionary Anthropology and Psycholinguistics show how
human children and chimpanzees pass on knowledge through social
learning. Initially, the researchers wanted to find out whether
children and apes are more likely to copy a behaviour that has
been demonstrated more often or one that has been demonstrated
by more individuals. In the relevant experimental setting,
2-year-old children, chimpanzees and orangutans could receive a
reward from an apparatus consisting of three differently
coloured subsections if they dropped a ball into a hole. Four
individuals then demonstrated an