Spotted Hyenas Cooperate Better Than Chimps

Some fascinating research by a comparative psychologist, Christine Drea, from Duke University, who has had trouble getting this sort of stuff published in the past because it was outside the mainstream of comparative cognitive psychological research. She has shown that spotted hyenas out-perform chimps on tasks that require them to learn how to cooperate by pulling synchronously on two ropes to release a food reward from the palette they are tied to. Chimps are notoriously bad at these cooperative tasks and require extensive and long-winded teaching, but the hyenas figured out how to do it very quickly and under their own steam. When a naive animal was paired with an experienced socially dominant animal the latter would temporarily suspend dominant behaviour and submissively follow the lower-ranking animal, only to re-assert itself once the task was ended. The only pairing that performed poorly were two highly dominant animals. The tasks were performed in silence but there was a lot of mutual gaze-following going on.

So here we have a species evolutionarily remote from chimps out-performing them in very much the same way, on a very similar task, that bonobos - very closely related to chimps - do. It is yet more evidence that advanced social cognition is not strictly reflective of genetic proximity but social structure. As the article says, "Researchers have focused on primates for decades on the assumption that higher cognitive functioning in larger-brained animals should enable organized team-work. But Drea's study demonstrates that social carnivores, including dogs, may be very good at cooperative problem-solving even though their brains are comparatively smaller. "I'm not saying", says Drea, "that spotted hyenas are smarter than chimps just that they are more hard-wired for social cooperation". What I say is that cognition is taxonomically blind. It is an adaptive tool to do an adaptive job and here it arises out of social structure.