Studies on our closest relatives revealed mixed findings across tasks. To test basic prosocial behavior in non-humans, there are presently two main approaches prosocial choice tasks in which an animal has a selection of choices of which only one benefits a partner, and instrumental helping tasks in which a token or tool is out of reach for a partner, yet can be transferred by the animal without self-benefit. Current research suggests that at least some social animals may also act so that another individual profits by that action. P26806).Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īn intentional behavior benefiting another individual at low or no cost to the actor, in other words prosociality, emerges early in our development, long before socialization plays a major role, suggesting that humans may be pre-disposed to act prosocially. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting information files.įunding: This work was funded by FWF projects P29084, P29075, Y 01309 and WWTF CS18-023 to Alice Auersperg and by a grant of the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) to Jorg Massen (no. Received: DecemAccepted: JPublished: June 29, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Laumer et al. Ryabinin, Oregon Health and Science University, UNITED STATES Future studies should focus on explanations for the intra-specific variation of this behaviour, and should test other parrots and other large-brained birds to see how this can be generalized across the class and to investigate the evolutionary history of this trait.Ĭitation: Laumer IB, Massen JJM, Boehm PM, Boehm A, Geisler A, Auersperg AMI (2021) Individual Goffin´s cockatoos ( Cacatua goffiniana) show flexible targeted helping in a tool transfer task. Additionally, there was no difference in the likelihood of the correct tool being transferred first for either of the two apparatuses, suggesting that these birds flexibly adjusted what to transfer based on their partner´s need. Furthermore, one of these birds transferred that correct tool first more often before transferring any other object in the test condition than in the no-partner condition, while the other two cockatoos were marginally non-significantly more likely to do so. Yet, importantly and similar to apes, three out of eight birds transferred the correct tool more often in the test condition than in a condition that also featured an apparatus but no partner. As expected from this species, we recorded playful object transfers across all conditions. Here, we tested Goffin’s cockatoos, which proved to be skilled tool innovators in captivity, in a tool transfer task in which an actor had access to four different objects/tools and a partner to one of two different apparatuses that each required one of these tools to retrieve a reward. Recent studies highlight the prosocial tendencies of several bird species, yet flexible targeted helping remained untested, largely due to methodological issues as such tasks are generally designed around tool-use, and very few bird species are capable of tool-use. So far, apart from humans such behaviour has only been experimentally shown in chimpanzees and in Eurasian jays. Flexible targeted helping is considered an advanced form of prosocial behavior in hominoids, as it requires the actor to assess different situations that a conspecific may be in, and to subsequently flexibly satisfy different needs of that partner depending on the nature of those situations.
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