FORAGING COGNITION IN NEOTROPICAL PRIMATES: INTEGRATING STUDIES FROM WILD AND CAPTIVITY

TUJAGUE, M. P.; JANSON, C. H.

Primatology in Argentina l

SAREM (Sociedad Argentina para el Estudio de los Mamíferos)

Año: 2017; p. 151 - 170

Individual foraging behavior includes exploration and use of information related to resources. While memory of food location has long been suspected to be a selective factor in the evolution of increased intelligence, experiments and observations in wild and captivity provide strong evidence that primates remember other critical features of resources that may influence the probability of finding and revisiting them. Several studies indicate that primates are able to remember the location of a resource, to anticipate the quantity of reward to be obtained and to plan routes that efficiently visit multiple resources. There is less evidence for primate cognition of temporal patterns of fruit ripening. A few studies suggest that some species know that fruits of the same type ripen relatively synchronously and also remember the quantity of ripe and unripe fruit, information that can be used to predict ripening intervals and adjust the timing of revisits to individual food resources. Since most of these studies came from Old World species, the aim of the present chapter is to review experimental and observational studies in Neotropical primates from the wild and captivity about these topics, giving special attention to studies carried out with capuchin monkeys in Argentina.