抄録
Social coordination can provide optimal solutions to many kinds of group dilemmas, and non-human primates have been shown to perform single actions successively or simultaneously with partners to maximize food rewards in a variety of experimental settings. Less attention has been given to showing how animals are able to produce multiple (rather than single) intermixed and co-regulated actions, even though many species’ signal transmissions and social interactions rely on extended bouts of coordinated turn-taking. Here we report on coordinative behavior in three pairs of chimpanzees (mother/offspring dyads) during an experimentally induced turn-taking scenario. Participants were given a “shared” version of a numerical sequencing task that they were already experts at performing alone. We found that minimal trial-and-error learning was necessary for the participants to solve the new social version of the task, which suggested spontaneous comprehension of division-of-labor and turn-taking heuristics. Within dyads, information flow was more pronounced from mothers toward offspring than the reverse, mirroring characteristics of social learning in wild chimpanzees. Directed social information flow is thus a phenomenon that also applies to coordinative contexts in which mothers and offspring are required to co-regulate their actions. We anticipate that both our methods and results will contribute to a more detailed understanding of the emergence of coordinated action in animals and humans.
