BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

    Quaresmini, C. and Forrester, Gillian and Spiezio, C. and Vallortigara, G. (2014) Social environment elicits lateralized behaviors in Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology 128 (3), pp. 276-84. ISSN 0735-7036.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    16691.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript

    Download (714kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    The influence of the social environment on lateralized behaviors has now been investigated across a wide variety of animal species. New evidence suggests that the social environment can modulate behavior. Currently, there is a paucity of data relating to how primates navigate their environmental space, and investigations that consider the naturalistic context of the individual are few and fragmented. Moreover, there are competing theories about whether only the right or rather both cerebral hemispheres are involved in the processing of social stimuli, especially in emotion processing. Here we provide the first report of lateralized social behaviors elicited by great apes. We employed a continuous focal animal sampling method to record the spontaneous interactions of a captive zoo-living colony of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and a biological family group of peer-reared western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). We specifically focused on which side of the body (i.e., front, rear, left, right) the focal individual preferred to keep conspecifics. Utilizing a newly developed quantitative corpus-coding scheme, analysis revealed both chimpanzees and gorillas demonstrated a significant group-level prefer- ence for focal individuals to keep conspecifics positioned to the front of them compared with behind them. More interestingly, both groups also manifested a population-level bias to keep conspecifics on their left side compared with their right side. Our findings suggest a social processing dominance of the right hemisphere for context-specific social environments. Results are discussed in light of the evolu- tionary adaptive value of social stimulus as a triggering factor for the manifestation of group-level lateralized behaviors.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): cerebral lateralization, social stimuli, chimpanzee, gorilla, behavior
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 14 Nov 2016 11:29
    Last Modified: 09 Jun 2021 19:38
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16691

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    536Downloads
    6 month trend
    254Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item