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Cited by 150Primate Behavior and EcologyChild and Animal Learning DevelopmentAnimal Behavior and Reproduction

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Social complexity predicts transitive reasoning in prosimian primates

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MacLean, Evan L., Merritt, Dustin J., Brannon, Elizabeth M.·2008·Animal Behaviour
DOI 10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.01.025PMC PMC2598410
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Abstract

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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Metadata

Authors
MacLean, E. L., Merritt, D. J., & Brannon, E. M.
Affiliations
Duke University (US)
Corresponding author
MacLean, Evan L.
ORCID
Venue
Animal Behaviour
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2008-08
Volume
76
Issue
2
Pages
479-486
ISSN
0003-3472 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.01.025
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
Licence
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
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › 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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