Grooming interventions in female rhesus macaques as social niche construction

Social animals invest time and resources into adapting their social environment, which emerges not only from their own but also from the decisions of other group members. Thus, individuals have to monitor interactions between others and potentially decide when and how to interfere to prevent damage to their own investment. These interventions can be subtle, as in the case of affiliative interactions such as grooming, but they can inform us about how animals structure their world and influence other group members. Here, we used interventions into grooming bouts in female rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, to determine who intervened in which grooming bouts, and what determined intervention outcomes, based on kinship, dominance rank and affiliative relationships between groomers and (potential) interveners. We show that high dominance rank of groomers reduced the risk of intervention. Bystanders, particularly when high ranking, intervened in grooming of their kin, close affiliates and close-ranked competitors. Interveners gained access to their close affiliates for subsequent grooming. Reduced aggression risk facilitated grooming involving three individuals, which was more common when a strong affiliative relationship existed and when interveners were lower in rank than the groomers. Thus, interventions in this species involved the monitoring of grooming interactions, decision making based on several individual and dyadic characteristics, and potentially allowed individuals to broaden their access to grooming partners, protect their own relationships and influence their social niche

Data for "How does social context modulate risky decision-making in long-tailed macaques"

This is the data associated with the preprint and OSF project titled "How does social context modulate risky decision-making in long-tailed macaques" See also: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/uh6m

How does social context modulate risky decision-making in long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis)? A research report on problematic issues with a repeated sampling from experience paradigm

We compared the risk preferences of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) in a social and a nonsocial condition, where we assessed their preference for a safe or a risky option after repeated information sampling. To this end, we devised a food dispenser that could run automatically or involve a human distributor. Only two of the initial set of ten monkeys reached the final test conditions; these two monkeys did not prefer a particular option in any of the conditions. In light of the unexpected difficulties that the monkeys had in learning the reward contingencies, we discuss a potential problem with paradigms that involve extracting statistical information from repeated sampling events. Given that such a paradigm has been used repeatedly and is still being used with different animals, we feel the field might benefit from a critical discussion of how to increase the validity of the data generated by this paradigm. We suggest that it is crucial to obtain a good estimate of the amount of sampling information a particular study population needs for optimal decision-making before any test conditions are run. We would have benefited greatly from the availability of more detailed reporting of similar difficulties in other populations, for example, information regarding timeframe and necessary amount of information on sampling events or previous failures with specific presentation formats. We hope this report can serve as a source of information for others working on this or related topics

How does social context modulate risky decision-making in long-tailed macaques?

A research report on problematic issues with a repeated sampling from experience paradigm Abstract We compared the risk preferences of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) in a social and a nonsocial condition, where we assessed their preference for a safe or a risky option after repeated information sampling. To this end, we devised a food dispenser that could run automatically or involve a human distributor. Only two of the initial set of ten monkeys reached the final test conditions; these two monkeys did not prefer a particular option in any of the conditions. In light of the unexpected difficulties that the monkeys had in learning the reward contingencies, we discuss a potentially problematic point regarding the paradigm of extracting statistical information from repeated sampling events. Given that the paradigm has been used repeatedly and is still being used with different animals, the field might benefit from a critical discussion of how to increase the validity of the data generated in this paradigm. We suggest that it is crucial to obtain a good estimate of the amount of sampling information a particular study population needs for optimal decision-making before the actual test conditions are run. We would have benefited greatly from the availability of more detailed reporting of similar difficulties in other populations, for example, regarding the timeframe and necessary amount of information on sampling events or previous failures with specific presentation formats. We hope this report can serve as a source of information for others working on this or related topics