Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Coordination, where two or more individuals align their actions to achieve a common goal, has been documented in several species using the rope-pulling paradigm. Nonetheless, the extent to which subjects understand their partner's role in facilitating successful coordination remains unclear. We tested five pairs of common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) to address this question using successive phases with increasing demand for coordination (decreasing rope length and delaying one monkey). Two of the tested pairs succeeded on all rope lengths as well as a 5s delay but failed a 10s delay. Behavioral analyses showed that these two pairs achieved success through different mechanisms employed by each subject, suggesting that individually learned behavior may be sufficient to support coordination in the absence of shared intentionality, at least in the context of a physically intuitive task. Our study yields novel insights into the cognitive underpinnings of coordination in a cooperatively breeding species.