Cognitive bases of great ape cultures
We develop field experiments in various communities of wild chimpanzees in Uganda to study how their cultural knowledge influence how they solve tasks. Field experiments are notoriously hard to conduct in the wild. The ‘honey-trap experiment’ allowed showing that two communities of chimpanzees in two different forests would solve the same problem (honey trapped inside a log) with different tools, in line with their cultural knowledge (Gruber et al. 2009). This study has become a classic in the animal culture literature and has been replicated in other species (e.g. capuchins) by other researchers. We have developed new paradigms to investigate the use of moss-sponge in Ugandan chimpanzees.
Main papers of interest
Gruber, T., Muller, M.N., Strimling, P., Wrangham, R.W. & Zuberbühler, K. (2009) Wild chimpanzees rely on cultural knowledge to solve an experimental honey acquisition task. Current biology, 19:1806-10. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.060
Gruber, T., Muller, M.N., Reynolds, V., Wrangham, R.W. & Zuberbühler, K. (2011) Community-specific evaluation of tool affordances in wild chimpanzees. Scientific Reports, 1, doi: 10.1038/srep00128
Gruber, T., Singleton, I. & van Schaik, C.P. (2012) Sumatran orangutans differ in their cultural knowledge but not in their cognitive abilities. Current Biology, 22(23), 2231-2235. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.041
Gruber, T., Zuberbühler, K., Clément, F. & van Schaik, C.P. (2015) Apes have culture but may not know that they do. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:91. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00091
