The curious case of great ape curiosity and how it is shaped by sociality

Abstract

AbstractAlthough curiosity has huge implications for human creativity and learning, its evolutionary roots and function in animals remain poorly understood. Modern humans, who lack natural predators, thrive with curiosity, but our ancestors faced more hazardous environments that would not necessarily favor individual curiosity. Instead, being curious may have undergone selection in interaction with sociality. Our closest living relatives, the great apes (henceforth apes) have evolved facing conditions more like human ancestors and as such, can help us understand the functions of curiosity and its expression in non‐human species. In this study, we defined curiosity as a combination of behavioral traits like neophilia, exploration diversity, and prolonged interest in exploring novelty and compared it, under similar captive environments across four ape species (N = 101):Pan troglodytes,Pan paniscus,Pongo abelii,andPongo pygmaeus. Results revealed that curiosity followed a linear gradient across the four species in accordance with their sociality. We proposethe social curiosity hypothesisto explain the observed pattern, reflecting those individuals in highly social species, like bonobos and chimpanzees, regularly are accompanied by conspecifics, and thereby accustomed to an abundance of social cues, leading to inhibited curiosity when alone, compared to more solitary orangutans. As such, our study implies that ape curiosity evolved interlinked with sociality. Further, a subset of the sample (N = 46) enabled us to examine if curiosity benefits problem‐solving skills, but our data did not support such link.