UC San Diego

The need to successfully navigate complex social environments has been a driving force in primate cognitive evolution. Few studies, however, have addressed the developmental processes that result in the sophisticated social skills exhibited by adults. Fewer still have investigated these processes in their ecological context, through observations of wild animals. My dissertation contributes to this lacuna by adopting concepts and methods from anthropological and psychological studies of human development, and applying them to the study of wild olive baboons. As the most widespread and successful non-human primate species, and the one with arguably the greatest socio-ecological complexity, these animals are ideal study subjects.

Over the course of 16 months, I collected data on infant behavior, mother-infant interactions, and infants’ attachment relationships in wild but habituated individuals at the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project site in Kenya. I then situated my data both in time and space, through the analysis of long-term UNBP data and the comparison of two baboon troops in ecologically distinct areas. My results demonstrate the validity of using visual orientation to investigate baboon cognition; the positive effect of exposure to social interactions on the development of social competence; and the crucial role played by mothers as gatekeepers of infant social exposure. I also describe the intricate and reciprocal ways that maternal responsiveness and infants’ secondary attachments interact in shaping infant behavior, supporting a developmental model whereby infants are influenced but at the same time influence those with whom they interact. Finally, rapid environmental changes have led to faster female reproductive rates in one study troop. Here I show how this has affected maternal behavior with consequences for the development of infant independence and social behavior.

My research nests infant baboons’ social behavior within ever-broadening spheres of influence, from the mother-infant relationship to large-scale environmental changes, shedding light on the dynamic and dialectical relationship between individual behavior and the broader socio-ecological context. In doing so, I provide a comparative evolutionary model of the effects of developmental context on the process of socialization, thereby improving our understanding of how naïve infants – human and non-human alike – become competent social actors.