Past Event: Cooperation, Conflict, and Social Learning in Capuchin Monkeys

Humans are remarkable in our ability to cooperate, innovate, and reliably learn from others. These abilities have been linked with our large brains and serve as the building blocks of human society. Yet, to what extent are these cognitive capacities uniquely human, or do they reflect broader evolutionary trends found across primates? Answering this question requires a comparative approach—exploring the cognitive abilities and behavioral strategies of our close evolutionary relatives. My research integrates insights from behavioral ecology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology to investigate cooperative decision-making, innovative problem-solving, and social learning strategies in captive and wild capuchin monkeys. Despite their phylogenetic distance from humans, capuchins exhibit several convergent behavioral traits—including prolonged developmental periods, enlarged brains relative to their body size, advanced extractive foraging techniques, pronounced social tolerance, and culturally transmitted social traditions—that make them uniquely suited as comparative models for understanding the evolutionary roots of social cognition.

In this talk, I highlight two key lines of inquiry from my recent work. First, I present experimental research on captive capuchins, examining how intergroup conflict shapes cooperative decision-making. Specifically, I explore the conditions under which conflict can promote cooperation among group members and discuss how hormonal mechanisms, particularly oxytocin, mediate these cooperative choices during competitive scenarios. Second, I describe my ongoing field research, introducing novel experimental methods designed to assess innovation, behavioral flexibility, and problem-solving strategies in wild capuchins at my field site, Capuchinos de Taboga in Costa Rica. These field-friendly approaches integrate the methodological rigor of controlled laboratory experiments with the ecological validity of naturalistic contexts, allowing us to directly link cognitive performance to real world social and ecological challenges. By combining the best aspects of field work, highlighting the emergence of social challenges, and the best aspects of controlled experiments, highlighting the mechanisms of social choices, my research offers a promising avenue for understanding the importance of sociality, cooperation, and conflict on primate cognitive evolution.