Periodic Reporting for period 3 - KNOWLEDGE MOVES (From the individual to the system: Understanding knowledge movement)
Berichtszeitraum: 2024-01-01 bis 2025-06-30
A major challenge of the Anthropocene is for individuals to adapt to rapidly changing environments. In long-lived species, adaptation will require successful innovations to spread efficiently through social units, emphasising an increasing role of social learning and culture. Given that humans are the most cultural species on the planet, what factors limit or enhance social transfer in other species?
Vervet monkeys are an ideal model species to study knowledge flow due to their social structure, with males migrating multiple times within their lifetime. Moreover, with the establishment of my field site, I am uniquely placed to conduct experiments on multiple groups. At the individual level, using innovative technology (bio-loggers and molecular tools), I will detect how males adjust to their new physical and social environment following migration with respect to dialects and diet, and respectively how groups adapt to migrants. To test how information spreads, I will conduct experiments using novel touchscreen technology to discover whether migrants always conform to their new group’s knowledge or if groups can learn from migrants. Quantitative models based on the vervet data will be constructed to capture information spread at group and population levels. Primates being living links to our past, comparing these models to the existing literature on humans will reveal to what extent social transmission seen in humans is common throughout the primate lineage, and what differences make human culture so unique.
By linking ground-breaking approaches in the wild with modelling work, this project will revolutionise our current knowledge of social information transmission within primate societies. Understanding information movement under changing environments will improve our ability to predict how primates will cope with the constantly increasing human impact and an unpredictable future, as well as refine our understanding of the uniqueness of cultural transfer in humans.
Vervet monkeys are an ideal model species to study knowledge flow due to their social structure, with males migrating multiple times within their lifetime. Moreover, with the establishment of my field site, I am uniquely placed to conduct experiments on multiple groups. At the individual level, using innovative technology (bio-loggers and molecular tools), I will detect how males adjust to their new physical and social environment following migration with respect to dialects and diet, and respectively how groups adapt to migrants. To test how information spreads, I will conduct experiments using novel touchscreen technology to discover whether migrants always conform to their new group’s knowledge or if groups can learn from migrants. Quantitative models based on the vervet data will be constructed to capture information spread at group and population levels. Primates being living links to our past, comparing these models to the existing literature on humans will reveal to what extent social transmission seen in humans is common throughout the primate lineage, and what differences make human culture so unique.
By linking ground-breaking approaches in the wild with modelling work, this project will revolutionise our current knowledge of social information transmission within primate societies. Understanding information movement under changing environments will improve our ability to predict how primates will cope with the constantly increasing human impact and an unpredictable future, as well as refine our understanding of the uniqueness of cultural transfer in humans.
The objectives of KNOWLEDGE MOVES are to identify cultural transmission patterns from the individual to the system level and to test their importance for the expression of adaptive behaviour in wild primates. To achieve these ambitious goals, I will:
1) Use bio-loggers with acoustic recorders and molecular tools to gather unprecedented high quality behavioural & movement data on individual migrants
2) Test experimentally knowledge transmission from immigrants into their new group and from the group to immigrants using touchscreen technology
3) Create models based on our results to predict knowledge transfer at a larger scale
1) Use bio-loggers with acoustic recorders and molecular tools to gather unprecedented high quality behavioural & movement data on individual migrants
2) Test experimentally knowledge transmission from immigrants into their new group and from the group to immigrants using touchscreen technology
3) Create models based on our results to predict knowledge transfer at a larger scale
An important goal of the project will be to extend our observer lens to establish an unprecedented and detailed picture of immigrant wild primates, something which has major significance to understanding the nature of human societies, given our close phylogenetic relationship with other primates. Testing experimentally the possibility of horizontal transfer of information by migrants to the group and vice-versa will transform our vision of the influence of migration on cultural evolution. By pioneering bio-logger and eDNA approaches to gather high quality behavioural data I will validate new methods for the field of animal behaviour as a whole. These data will enable me to access the relative importance of arbitrary traditions (i.e. dialects) versus potentially adaptive traditions (i.e. feeding preferences) in wild vervets. Implementing touchscreen technology in the field will be totally ground-breaking, finally enabling comparative cognition experiments across species and contexts (e.g. captivity vs wild). The modelling part of KNOWLEDGE MOVES will yield explicit transmission networks for vervets that can be applied to other data sets of primates including humans; only when we better understand how the range of social learning biases operate in different contexts and species will we fully understand how they function to contribute to the emergence and maintenance of culture on different scales53. Overall this project will revolutionise our current knowledge of the mechanisms and functions underlying primate social transmission.