10.6084/m9.figshare.1615062.v1 Alecia Carter Alecia Carter Guy Cowlishaw Guy Cowlishaw Experimentally-induced traditions in wild baboon groups figshare 2015 information transfer social information animal culture animal tradition baboon Papio ursinus Zoology Evolutionary Biology 2015-12-03 07:59:33 Poster https://figshare.com/articles/poster/Experimentally_induced_traditions_in_wild_baboon_groups/1615062 <p>Poster presented for Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour Winter conference 2015. </p> <p>Submitted title: Why don't baboons have culture? Constraints on information transmission in wild baboon groups</p> <p>Submitted abstract: </p> <p>The formation of culture in animal societies, including humans, relies on the social transmission of information among individuals in a group. While the cognitive capacities for social transmission of information appear to be present in a wide range of animal species, culture has only been described for handful of species. Whether or not a novel behaviour becomes adopted by an entire group to form a culture may depend on how individuals acquire and use social information. In this regard, two points are particularly important: (i) not all individuals will have the same opportunities to acquire social information because of differences in their social connections, and (ii) individuals may differ in their propensities to use such information once they have acquired it. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by introducing two novel tasks to groups of wild baboons. We investigated the effect of social network position, personality, dominance rank, age and sex on baboons’ propensities to initially solve the task; opportunities to acquire social information about the task; and propensities to subsequently solve the task after having had opportunities to acquire social information. We discuss the implications of the results for the formation of culture in baboon groups.</p>