Risk sensitivity, phylogenetic reconstruction, and four chimpanzees.

Abstract

Sensitivity to variance, or risk, has been considered elementary to economic decision making, featured prominently in discussions of primate species-typical behaviors and phylogeny, and heralded as a challenge to deterministic foraging theory. Most risk sensitivity studies involve dichotomous choices and small spatial scales, providing only limited bases for predicting how variance information might be used across contexts. We examined foraging risk-sensitivity in four chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) which were presented containers associated with particular mean food rewards/variances. Preferences were measured via indoor dichotomous choice tests. Subsequent tasks, designed to assess how well these preferences held up across situations, involved a differing food type, rank-ordering arrays of containers, and/or recovering them in a large outdoor testing area. In addition, some variations involved memory for containers previously observed being hidden. Risk preferences varied by subject, experimental context, reward type, and mean reward quantity. In rank-ordering experiments, under the reward contingencies utilized, mean food quantity was a better predictor of selection order than variance. These results bring into question arguments that species-typical primate risk traits-in the sense of enduring, generalized dispositional features of organisms-have been firmly identified, and suggest that many popular experimental strategies are alone inadequate for reconstructing risk-related traits in primate/human evolution. Models from classical foraging theory, which do not address variance, have likely been successful because they include crucial variables with robust predictive value. Determining the importance of variance to naturalistic decision-making, on the other hand, will require further testing in a wide range of experimental and observational contexts.