Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated whether capuchin monkeys could use information about rewarded and unrewarded stimuli such that chain-ing of their response patterns would in principle generate increasingly successful performances, indicative of potential forcumulative culture. Two populations of tufted capuchin monkeys were tested using a touchscreen stimulus-selection taskrequiring subjects to learn the strategy of repeating rewarded, and avoiding unrewarded selections following demonstra-tions of varying success. Although capuchins outperformed demonstrations of chance-level performance (simulating per-formance of a nave individual), they did not consistently outperform demonstrations of above-chance-level success. Thissuggests that, in a social transmission scenario, the accumulation of beneficial information over successive transmissionevents would be relatively limited. Despite mastering the task contingencies, the capuchins did not use the informationoptimally, limiting the potential for cumulative culture. Our data may provide insights into factors constraining cumulativeculture in the natural behaviour of non-humans.