Abstract
There is growing comparative evidence that the cognitive bases of cooperation are not unique to humans. However, the selective pressures that lead to the evolution of these mechanisms remain unclear. Here we show that while tool-making New Caledonian crows can produce collaborative behavior, they do not understand the causality of cooperation nor show sensitivity to inequity. Instead, the collaborative behavior produced appears to have been underpinned by the transfer of prior experience. These results suggest that a number of possible selective pressures, including tool manufacture and mobbing behaviours, have not led to the evolution of cooperative cognition in this species. They show that causal cognition can evolve in a domain specific manner–understanding the properties and flexible uses of physical tools does not necessarily enable animals to grasp that a conspecific can be used as a social tool.
Highlights
Human cooperation is based upon two cognitive building blocks
The second is a sense of fairness: cooperators must avoid situations where they put a lot of effort into a cooperative task and receive little reward compared to their partner(s)
The subject picked up a stone and placed it within reach of another crow, which dropped the stone into a hole in an apparatus to collapse a baited platform
Summary
Human cooperation is based upon two cognitive building blocks. The first is an understanding of the causality of cooperation: that a conspecific can be used as a social tool to achieve a goal that is inaccessible via individual action. The second is a sense of fairness (inequity aversion): cooperators must avoid situations where they put a lot of effort into a cooperative task and receive little reward compared to their partner(s). Whilst these cognitive mechanisms are welldeveloped in humans [1], we do not fully understand the selective pressures that led to their evolution. Cooperative string-pulling tasks have yielded evidence that pairs of animals from a variety of species can perform actions simultaneously to achieve a goal [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Elephants will wait for up to 45 seconds for a partner to arrive before they begin to act on a PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0133253 August 12, 2015
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