Social complexity predicts transitive reasoning in prosimian primates
Open accessAbstract
Transitive Inference is a form of deductive reasoning that has been suggested as one cognitive mechanism by which animals could learn the many relationships within their group's dominance hierarchy. This process thus bears relevance to the social intelligence hypothesis which posits evolutionary links between various forms of social and nonsocial cognition. Recent evidence corroborates the link between social complexity and transitive inference and indicates that highly social animals may show superior transitive reasoning even in nonsocial contexts. We examined the relationship between social complexity and transitive inference in two species of prosimians, a group of primates that diverged from the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans over 50 million years ago. In Experiment 1, highly social ring-tailed lemurs, Lemur catta, outperformed the less social mongoose lemurs, Eulemur mongoz, in tests of transitive inference and showed more robust representations of the underlying ordinal relationships between the stimuli. In Experiment 2, after training under a correction procedure that emphasized the underlying linear dimension of the series, both species showed similar transitive inference. This finding suggests that the two lemur species differ not in their fundamental ability to make transitive inferences, but rather in their predisposition to mentally organize information along a common underlying dimension. Together, these results support the hypothesis that social complexity is an important selective pressure for the evolution of cognitive abilities relevant to transitive reasoning.
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Comparisons on actual cognitive tests of species that live in social systems of differing social complexity offer the strongest test of the social intelligence hypothesis because they provide a direct comparison of species' cognition in a specific domain.
“Comparisons on actual cognitive tests of species that live in social systems of differing social complexity offer the strongest test of the social intelligence hypothesis because they provide a direct comparison of species’ cognition in a specific domain (e.g., Bond et al. 2003; MacLean et al. 2008).”
From How does cognition evolve? Phylogenetic comparative psychology (2012) · cites this paper as MacLean et al. 2008
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- Authors
- MacLean, E. L., Merritt, D. J., & Brannon, E. M.
- Affiliations
- Duke University (US)
- Corresponding author
- MacLean, Evan L.
- Venue
- Animal Behaviour
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2008-08
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 479-486
- ISSN
- 0003-3472 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2598410
- OpenAlex
- W2106451468
- Cited by
- 149
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 15
- FWCI
- 6.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Animal Behaviour (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- John Merck Fund
- National Institutes of Health
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD049912)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Primate Behavior and Ecology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Animal Behavior and Reproduction
- Keywords
- transitive inference, social complexity, prosimian primates, Lemur catta, social intelligence hypothesis, dominance hierarchy, cognitive evolution, comparative cognition, Eulemur mongoz
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