Selective attention for affiliative and agonistic interactions of dominants and close affiliates in macaques

Oliver Schülke,Julia Ostner,Natalie Dumdey

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-62772-8

Abstract

Monitoring conspecifics is a crucial process in social learning and a building block of social cognition. Selective attention to social stimuli results from interactions of subject and stimulus characteristics with dominance rank often emerging as an important predictor. We extend previous research by providing as stimuli naturally occurring affiliative interactions between group members instead of pictorial or auditory representations of conflicts, and by extending to the affiliative relationship, i.e. social bond, between subject and stimulus instead of just their dominance relations. Our observational data on adult female rhesus macaques support the prediction that subjects pay more attention to affiliative interactions of others than to solitary controls. Exceedingly more attention was paid to conflicts unfolding in the group which can have more prompt and direct consequences than others’ friendly interactions. The valence of the stimulus (affiliative vs. agonistic) affected biases towards individuals dominant over the subject, but not the ubiquitous bias towards close affiliates of the subject. Keeping track of the whereabouts and interactions of key social partners has been proposed as a prerequisite for behavioral coordination among bonded partners. In groups of socially very active monkeys, social attention is gated by both social dominance and social bonding.

Highlights

Monitoring conspecifics is a crucial process in social learning and a building block of social cognition
Not all information is valued to the same degree leading to selective attention varying with traits of the subject, of the stimulus individual or event, or their combination
Social attention varies with subject rank; only high-ranking subjects showed late reactions suggestive of voluntary attention sensitive to stimulus rank[16]; low ranking subjects showed a fast, quasi-reflexive reaction that was not modulated by stimulus dominance rank

Summary

Introduction

Monitoring conspecifics is a crucial process in social learning and a building block of social cognition. Vertebrates living in social groups evolved a suite of socio-cognitive skills to maneuver their social environment[1] These skills include individual recognition, tracking one’s own past interactions, monitoring others’ interactions, assessing others’ relationships, and attributing mental states to others. Research on within group variation in social attention established that social attention is gated by dominance rank in primates, leading to an “attentional structure” reflecting the dominance hierarchy in a social group[8,9,10] This pattern of selective attention towards higher ranking individuals[9] along with competition for attractive high ranking partners[11] has since been found in a number of species and using different paradigms from natural observations to experimental designs[7,12,13,14]; a recent study lacked a dominance effect though[15]. The agonistic interactions of one’s close affiliates may directly and promptly affect the subject

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