The Effects of Gender and Self Construal on Perception of Racism

When looking into the idea of if one\u27s gender and their self-construal has an effect on how they perceive racism, we hypothesize that women will take a more interdependent self-construal and men will take a more independent self-construal. Based on how they identify, we believe that those in the interdependent condition will perceive more racism and those in the independent condition will perceive less racism

The spread of a novel behaviour in wild chimpanzees : new insights into the ape cultural mind

TP was funded by the Canadian Research Chair in Continental Ecosystem Ecology, and received computational support from the Theoretical Ecosystem Ecology group at UQAR. The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) and from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) REA grant agreement n°329197 awarded to TG, ERC grant agreement n° 283871 awarded to KZ. WH was funded by a BBSRC grant (BB/I007997/1).For years, the animal culture debate has been dominated by the puzzling absence of direct evidence for social transmission of behavioural innovations in the flagship species of animal culture, the common chimpanzee. Although social learning of novel behaviours has been documented in captivity, critics argue that these findings lack ecological validity and therefore may not be relevant for understanding the evolution of culture. For the wild, it is possible that group-specific behavioural differences emerge because group members respond individually to unspecified environmental differences, rather than learning from each other. In a recent paper, we used social network analyses in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) to provide direct evidence for social transmission of a behavioural innovation, moss-sponging, to extract water from a tree hole. Here, we discuss the implications of our findings and how our new methodological approach could help future studies of social learning and culture in wild apes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Genetic Influences on Receptive Joint Attention in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

Despite their genetic similarity to humans, our understanding of the role of genes on cognitive traits in chimpanzees remains virtually unexplored. Here, we examined the relationship between genetic variation in the arginine vasopressin V1a receptor gene (AVPR1A) and social cognition in chimpanzees. Studies have shown that chimpanzees are polymorphic for a deletion in a sequence in the 59 flanking region of the AVPR1A, DupB, which contains the variable RS3 repetitive element, which has been associated with variation in social behavior in humans. Results revealed that performance on the social cognition task was significantly heritable. Furthermore, males with one DupB1 allele performed significantly better and were more responsive to socio-communicative cues than males homozygous for the DupB- deletion. Performance on a non-social cognition task was not associated with the AVPR1A genotype. The collective findings show that AVPR1A polymorphisms are associated with individual differences in performance on a receptive joint attention task in chimpanzees

Distal communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): evidence for common ground?

van der Goot et al. (2014) proposed that distal, deictic communication indexed the appreciation of the psychological state of a common ground between a signaler and a receiver. In their study, great apes did not signal distally, which they construed as evidence for the human uniqueness of a sense of common ground. This study exposed 166 chimpanzees to food and an experimenter, at an angular displacement, to ask, “Do chimpanzees display distal communication?” Apes were categorized as (a) proximal or (b) distal signalers on each of four trials. The number of chimpanzees who communicated proximally did not statistically differ from the number who signaled distally. Therefore, contrary to the claim by van der Goot et al., apes do communicate distally

Sex Differences in the Relationship Between Planum Temporale Asymmetry and Corpus Callosum Morphology in Chimpanzees (\u3cem\u3ePan troglodytes\u3c/em\u3e): A Combined MRI and DTI Analysis

Increases brain size has been hypothesized to be inversely associated with the expression of behavioral and brain asymmetries within and between species. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing the relation between asymmetries in the planum temporale (PT) and different measures of the corpus callosum (CC) including surface area, streamline count as measured from diffusion tensor imaging, fractional anisotropy values and the ratio in the number of fibers to surface area in a sample of chimpanzees. We found that chimpanzees with larger PT asymmetries in absolute terms had smaller CC surface areas, fewer streamlines and a smaller ratio of fibers to surface area. These results were largely specific to male but not female chimpanzees. Our results partially support the hypothesis that brain asymmetries are linked to variation in corpus callosum morphology, although these associations may be sex-dependent

Genetic Factors and Orofacial Motor Learning Selectively Influence Variability in Central Sulcus Morphology in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

International audienceCaptive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have been shown to learn the use of novel attention-getting (AG) sounds to capture the attention of humans as a means of requesting or drawing their attention to a desired object or food. There are significant individual differences in the use of AG sounds by chimpanzees and, here, we examined whether changes in cortical organization of the central sulcus (CS) were associated with AG sound production. MRI scans were collected from 240 chimpanzees, including 122 that reliably produced AG sounds and 118 that did not. For each subject, the depth of CS was quantified along the superior-inferior plane with specific interest in the inferior portion corresponding to the region of the motor cortex where the mouth and orofacial movements are controlled. Results indicated that CS depth in the inferior, but not superior, portion was significantly greater in chimpanzees that reliably produced AG sounds compared with those who did not. Quantitative genetic analyses indicated that overall CS surface area and depth were significantly heritable, particularly in the superior regions, but less so in the inferior and central portions. Further, heritability in CS depth was altered as a function of acquisition of AG sounds. The collective results suggest that learning to produce AG sounds resulted in region-specific cortical reorganization within the inferior portion of the CS, a finding previously undocumented in chimpanzees or any nonhuman primate