Andrew MacIntosh: 0:00

After the tune comparative cognitive scientist Dr Nicolas Claidiere on social learning, culture and conventions, right here on the PrimateCast.

Nicolas Claidiere: 0:15

Evolution, communication, cognition, conservation, behavior Primatology Primatology To be primates.

Andrew MacIntosh: 0:32

Become the monkey. Hey everyone, welcome to the PrimateCast. I'm your host, andrew McIntosh, now of the Wilder Institute Calgary Zoo. Before we get into the interview I've got lined up, today I have a little bit of podcast housekeeping to do. I want to remind everyone that, as I laid out in great detail in my last episode A Primatologist's Journey from Japan to the Wilder West, this podcast is no longer brought to you by PSYCASP and Kyoto University. The Primatecast is now independent and, as such, I've been asking for your support to help keep the podcast going. I realized that you just heard that in the pre-roll, but I bring it up now because I have the pleasure of thanking our very first set of podcast supporters. A monumental shout out to Cecil, paula and Melanie for becoming members of the Prime A cast. Your support means a lot to me and your contributions are going directly into the running costs of this program. So thanks so much. I've also seen a few new ratings here coming in on apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and there's a new review on Apple that reads I love the show, so many great episodes and I use it in my teaching in primatology too. So my thanks to Sarah McKeca for that review.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:44

I love that practicing primatologists are using the primate cast as an educational tool, either in or outside the classroom. I did that myself from time to time when I was teaching at Kyoto University, but it started to feel a bit like I was asking my students to buy my own textbook. So I used it kind of sparingly. Oh, and not that there's anything wrong with assigning your own textbook. If you're doing that, I mean heck. If you're Karen Stryer teaching primate behavioral ecology, you cannot go wrong with your own textbook. Or maybe you're Joe Setchel assigning your own book studying primates for a course on primatological methods. By all means, I've never even written a textbook and you know, maybe that means I'm just being sour, but the point is I'm super thrilled that others find the material I produce here of practical use. And if you're out there and if you've also used the Primatecast in your teaching, or if you find yourself being assigned or having been assigned the podcast for additional learning in your own classes in primatology, definitely reach out to me and let me know. Really cool. Anyway, thanks again to Cecil, paula, melanie and Sarah for your support. I'm looking forward to making this a staple part of the show's introductory notes. So if you're out there and can make a contribution. I look forward to thanking you in this space as well and sharing your thoughts with the world. Right, so on, with the episode In December of 2023, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr Nicolas Clédié.

Andrew MacIntosh: 3:08

He's a cognitive scientist at the Center for Research in Psychology and Neuroscience at Aix-Marsaille University in France, and I first met Nico many, many years ago at one of the International Primatological Society conferences. But he was in Japan at the end of last year 2023, with his friend and colleague, hugo Mercier, who had never and they'd never been to Kyoto University's Primate Center. So I invited them for a visit. So we talked briefly about Hugo in the conversation, but I also just wanted to give him a special shout out here and recommend to the listeners that you check out his book Not Born Yesterday, which argues that humans are not gullible I know definitely feels like many of us are many of the time, wait much of the time, but not so in the traditional sense and that we've actually evolved pretty strong mechanisms to evaluate information when we seemingly go wrong or fail. The common sense test is much more about the social dynamics of communication than any innate lack of sophistication in our ability to tell the difference between accurate and inaccurate information, which is pretty interesting. It's a great read and it's also really relevant to the conversation that I had with Nico, who does comparative research with primates, including humans, on social learning, social cognition and cultural evolution. We ran out of time during his visit to Japan so the interview was actually recorded over Zoom and I want to warn listeners that, especially during the second half of the interview, sometimes the audio quality gets a bit spotty. I don't think it'll make a difference or make the conversation too difficult to follow, but I did want to mention it to set your expectations.

Andrew MacIntosh: 4:43

But I had a lot of fun with this chat. You'll see that Nico has this kind of easygoing way about him when he talks and you can really feel his excitement, for example, when he talks about discovering the presence of conventions in a study troop of baboons that he works with. He talks about designing a totally different experiment for a totally different purpose and then scratching his head at the results but then having this aha moment. So conventions, they're really common in human societies, and by convention I don't mean those gatherings where people in a field or trade get together to share products, inspiring stories or the latest and greatest in their respective industries, but rather the collective behaviors that allow us to solve these so-called coordination problems, like when all people traveling by car in the same direction do so on the same side of the road and if they don't look out.

Andrew MacIntosh: 5:34

But we also spend a good deal of time in this chat talking about cultural evolution and its relation to biological evolution. A lot of animal behavior is explained by natural selection, which is one of the main mechanisms of biological evolution. That leads to adaptations which help the animal survive and have lots of babies. But animals are also capable of innovations. These are novel behaviors that appear spontaneously and then others are able to learn those innovations from one another. And a really interesting question then comes up that whether this type of social learning can build upon itself in the same way that we humans stack innovations one on top of the other, leading to cumulative cultural evolution. A great example of this in humans is Moore's law, which has been generalized to describe the kind of exponential nature of technological innovation and advancement that we see all around us. But, as Nico describes, the kind of technological reasoning that would allow other species to stack their socially learned behaviors in this way doesn't really seem to exist, especially when it comes to using tools, which is also a widespread behavior across the animal kingdom, but by no means does this mean that animals are uncultured beasts.

Andrew MacIntosh: 6:44

Nico and I chat at length about social learning, culture and the cognitive mechanisms that underlie them in this meandering and good-natured conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, so here's my conversation with Dr Nicolas Clédier. What I like to do, though, is start with a little bit of an off-the-wall question. What I like to do, though, is start with a little bit of an off-the-wall question, and I think for you.

Nicolas Claidiere: 7:12

Maybe the one that I came up with is what is the deal with bloodletting? What is the deal with bloodletting? Ah, that's a very interesting way to start.

Andrew MacIntosh: 7:23

Yeah, so tell me about bloodletting what?

Nicolas Claidiere: 7:28

is it and what's your involvement in it? So that study was done with Hugo Mercier, who is a very close friend of mine, who is working at Jean-Nico in Paris, and the idea was to think about factors that would influence cultural evolution and that were not adaptive in the sense that you wouldn't get behaviour that were adaptive for people, that would improve their welfare, their life and so on and so forth. And Hugo came with this idea of bloodletting. So this practice that seems to be very intuitive in a sense.

Nicolas Claidiere: 8:10

So if you feel sick, you have this sort of intuitive theory that you have some bad blood, that you have something that is wrong within you, and the idea to let the blood flow out is sort of intuitive idea. To let the blood flow out is sort of intuitive and it's also very shocking because you see blood coming out of people and so on and so forth. And we realised that this was one possible explanation for why bloodletting was spread, was widely used all over the place, in different places in the world, and so we started doing studies on how people would remember stories of bloodletting, following the work of Bartlett on memory, and we realized that this was a very important factor. So when people have a tendency to memorize and remember better stories with bloodletting than stories without, and that could be a contributing factor explaining why blood is evolved and spread in so many places in the world but that was that was completely off track.

Nicolas Claidiere: 9:14

That was one idea that came from ego. Really, it was like oh my god I've got an idea and that was that was really funny and, of course, bloodletting is very it's not adaptive at all, because when you see, the last thing you want is to lose blood. So people were doing this and they were, in fact, making people even worse. But that continues. That's still ongoing, apparently.

Andrew MacIntosh: 9:37

Yeah, and from what I understand about it, maybe you can mention too Ugo and Nico. You were both in Japan not that long ago and we had the chance to hang out for dinner and both of you gave talks to the graduate program here at Kyoto University and Ugo's was about the book writing. It was a science communication talk, but in one of his books, not Born Yesterday, he talks about this bloodletting. So I made a point of reading that and I find there's a couple of things interesting and maybe a couple of ways we can transition from bloodletting into your line of research.

Andrew MacIntosh: 10:09

But one thing I'm interested in is that idea that it's counterintuitive spreads really well and I think that the fact that it's counterintuitive seems to be a really key point about why it's interesting to study right. So it's kind of like when you're interested in why people perform certain behaviors, behaviors that have like a really clear advantage to us seem to make a lot of sense, right, and especially if we want to extend it to think about how other species behave in natural environments, if there are things that have a real advantage to them, you know, make them survive better, have more babies then those are things that can evolve by natural selection. But then the more kind of potentially even damaging behaviors like bloodletting, which I imagine would be a damaging behavior to a wild animal at some point it can still spread, at least in humans, because of certain mechanisms that we have, probably related to how much we like to copy each other. So I wonder if you can maybe comment on that. Why is it being so maladaptive or a potentially damaging behavior and counterintuitive? An interesting thing to study.

Nicolas Claidiere: 11:19

So I think you're right. Part of the interest for me in studying blood leading was this aspect about cultural evolution. So there are two ways in which you can get adaptive behaviour in humans and also in certain other species is through biological evolution, of course, but also through social learning and cultural evolution. And if you look at the way in which cultural evolution works, when you transmit behaviors between individuals over generations, then progressively because you're transmitting this bias it's going to accumulate, and then people are going to change and go for red all the time. So the small biases are going to accumulate over time.

Nicolas Claidiere: 12:16

And so the question is, when it's counterintuitive and it goes against your expectations, is trying to explain how cultural evolution can work in cases when it goes against what you would naturally or spontaneously do, and that's something that we've been working a lot with Hugo on, especially in the case of reasoning problems.

Nicolas Claidiere: 12:37

So sometimes you can ask simple problems to people and they have a very intuitive answer, but that is wrong. And then you're trying to describe how they can change their response based on the information that they get from other people. So you can explain how cultural evolution works when it becomes counterintuitive. And the idea I mean the general idea behind this is to go even beyond that. So, if you think about technological evolution, for instance, that changes all the time and we are very far now from where we were just a few, even 100 years ago. And the question is how do we maintain this constant influx of new technologies going against our sort of natural and spontaneous behaviors? We are adapting all the time and that's a big part of cultural evolution and that's something that is quite difficult to study and to understand in humans in particular.

Andrew MacIntosh: 13:38

Yeah, so we had Andrew Whiten give a lecture for us a couple years ago now at a symposium we ran for PSYCASP for our international kind of lecture series, and one of the questions I asked him because he was so important in this development of understanding culture in animal societies and one of the questions that I asked is related to the fact that in the earlier days, I guess and you could say maybe the 90s is when I could be wrong, but I think when most of this started to late 90s, early 2000s, when most of this, from a comparative perspective, started to converge and a lot of that was based on this chimpanzee study of multiple sites and these different behaviors that they perform.

Andrew MacIntosh: 14:18

But at the time it was really important to be able to show how variation behavior couldn't be linked to something clear in the environment, right Like it had to be something that's almost irrelevant right To the kind of survival or fitness of the animal and I wonder if that's his answer to that question was obviously in the beginning that might be true, because we have to be able to demonstrate this is not clearly linked to something that could be a simpler explanation for it, like an evolved behavior, but now it seems to be much more accepted that there are cultural differences and there is social learning and animals can kind of diverge in that way, and then that can still affect fitness, right, so yeah, so I wonder if maybe that's a good way to go into thinking about cultural evolution as well, and maybe it would be nice if you kind of defined that and maybe talked about its relationship to natural selection, so the regular way we think about evolution happening.

Nicolas Claidiere: 15:18

No, I agree with Andy. So at the beginning, because everybody was skeptical about the idea of cultural evolution and social learning in non-human primates but in animals in general, people had to come up with very clear demonstration of cases where you couldn't possibly argue for anything else like biological evolution or simply individual learning. So in many cases people were saying, if you find a nice new technique to open a nut using a stone, maybe individuals are learning that on their own without any form of social transmission and social learning. So people had to come up with very clear examples that were very on one extreme of the continuum. But of course, cultural evolution. So if we define cultural evolution as the fact that behaviors, artifacts, are transmitted between individuals through social learning, so that these are behaviors that you learn from other individuals, then it becomes clear that there is a mix of factors that can intervene in social learning.

Nicolas Claidiere: 16:32

There is a bit of individual learning. So think about I don't know I'm going to take a simple example for instance, think about learning to cycle. Okay, so we know that cycling, you know it's something that is very cultural. Obviously you learn that from a bit of your parents and your friends and you know you have a lot of social context, but there is also a lot of individual learning. You need to, you know, learn to balance and to get the right kind of equilibrium and to turn and so on and so forth.

Nicolas Claidiere: 17:04

So there's a mix of factors. There is genetic disposition, there is individual learning and there is social learning, and it's a combination of all that that makes it possible for cultural evolution to go on. But the more important is the social learning part, the clearer is the cultural aspect of the behavior or the artifact that you're looking at. So if you take a computer, it's very clear. Now, if you take something like, say well, for instance, Nutcracker, or you know, in Chinese, there's a bit of individual learning and there's a bit of social transmission. So it's sort of shaping the behavior and giving a bit of a push from the social learning side, and then you get this sort of transmission across generations. So you get the whole spectrum from purely individual learning to very strongly social learning.

Andrew MacIntosh: 17:57

I think I also asked Andy in that presentation if he had some examples from animals in the wild of, let's say, cases where we see this kind of culture potentially even impacting fitness. But I think you've looked at the interface or the feedbacks between potentially cultural and biological evolution. So do you have any maybe examples from other species about where that would be happening and how we should think about it?

Nicolas Claidiere: 18:31

Right. So, for instance, there was a, if we think I mean in many cases it's going to impact fitness because in many cases that we know of, there's food involved and there's extracting resources. So the nut cracking in chimpanzees obviously they're getting the nuts, so that's very important. There are examples, for instance, of rats in Israel doing social learning and they are learning to use a particular technique to get the seeds of pine cones, for instance. That's also very obviously very important for their survival and when they don't have this technique, it takes them like hours to get the seeds and when they have the technique, it takes them like a minute when they get the seeds. Uh, so these are very clear cases where there is a big impact on on biological evolution.

Nicolas Claidiere: 19:20

Uh, but the question is, I think so, as long as we are focused on on on behavior that do not evolve over time, uh, so in many cases in in animal cultural evolution, there is no evolution to speak of. So you're simply learning a behavior, say, not cracking, uh, but it's this behavior versus nothing. It's not like you have. You're learning several steps of nut cracking and you're getting better and better, or using different hammers or improving the technique. It's either one or nothing in human evolution, the the interaction between biological evolution and cultural evolution is more complex, because there is cultural evolution and then the problem becomes through cultural evolution you can sort of flatten biological evolution because you can learn new behaviors that are going to be adaptive and that are going to release the selection pressure on biological evolution, and that makes a huge difference. So the interaction between biological evolution and cultural evolution is very important in humans but it's less clear in non-human animals.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:33

Yeah, that's exactly where I wanted to go with it.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:35

I know you've spent a fair amount of time thinking and writing about the accumulation of cultures.

Andrew MacIntosh: 20:42

I think if you look around us, anywhere you are listening to this, you can see massive examples of it in human societies from the places we live in, the clothes we wear, the technologies we use. I mean almost everything I was having a discussion recently about I think it was related to this idea of long-termism. But basically, if we suddenly were thrust into a post-apocalyptic situation, it would take forever to get back to the place where we are now because there's so much knowledge I mean fundamental knowledge that's just kind of locked up in some time period in our history and it's really hard to go back to kind of fundamentals or first principles and start building the things that we have already. So it's very clear, as you said, how our kind of cultural evolution and technological evolution kind of would flatten the biological part of it. But are there any kind of examples of this in other species where there is a kind of clear building of different kind of learned, socially learned behaviors upon one another in a way that would kind of matter?

Nicolas Claidiere: 21:45

Yeah, I think, I like the question, but in the end in a way that would kind of matter, is very important.

Nicolas Claidiere: 21:58

I mean, people have been looking very hard to try to find cases where you get accumulation of cultural evolution, and people were so excited so there are a few examples. There is one, for instance, that I like from dora bureau, studying pigeons and pigeons flying from point a to b. And if you take completely naive pigeon they are going to look all over the place to to go from a to b and then progressively she makes transmission chain, so pigeons are flying with a friend and then the friend is playing with another friend, and so on and so forth, a bit like a telephone game. And what she says is that progressively the pigeons are finding the route that is the quickest, the most straightforward between point A and B. So again, I mean, if you think about it in natural environments, you could imagine that this has an impact because they, they, they are gaining energy flying from A to B. They have to do this all the time. Then it's faster, right, so it it kind of matters, but it's not. It's nothing, nothing like technological evolution. I think everybody agrees.

Nicolas Claidiere: 23:08

I mean there is no evidence that there is anything, especially using tools or things like this, that even resembles cultural evolution, technological evolution in humans, and that's a big problem and people have been arguing a lot about it. Some people think that this is linked to our social learning capacity, that we are very good social learners and that we can copy any kind of behavior. We can imitate many different things, and that this capacity is a reason why we get technological evolution.

Andrew MacIntosh: 23:49

other people like me and François Durillac for instance in Lyon.

Nicolas Claidiere: 23:52

I've been trying to argue that the main reason or at least one very important factor is that we are very good with tools and technologies to start with and that we've evolved like biologically evolved technological reasoning capacity, so we understand cause and effects and you know the different properties and physics of technology, and that's the main reason why we get technological evolution, and I think the joy is still out there somewhere. You know, but it's so. Typically, I mean, it's a combination of the two things you need social learning and you need technological reasoning to get technological evolution. The question is, what evolved first and what is the most important?

Andrew MacIntosh: 24:38

There's a few different ways we can go with this, but I am interested to maybe pursue the tools a little bit in non-humans.

Andrew MacIntosh: 24:46

One thing that's been interesting and I can't say I've followed it that closely, but this school of primate archaeology, and so maybe part of that is based on the fact that there is a material culture. So in great apes and chimpanzees most spectacularly I suppose, where even in the wild they're shown to use not only all kinds of tools but also tool sets, where they use different kinds of tools in the same sequence in order to access different types of resources. And unfortunately things like sticks, which would be their main tools, don't preserve in an archaeological record in any way. But I suppose there's the possibility that you have progressive improvements in the way those animals are using those sticks to access resources. That could be one possibility. And across the communities or across Africa, the extent to which different chimpanzee communities use tools is also quite different. One hypothesis could be that's just different stages of this. I don't know if it would be a cultural evolution of using things like sticks. You could maybe comment on that.

Nicolas Claidiere: 25:53

The tricky part is to show the fact that there is improvement in using tools is fine. You can find that they're getting better because they're using, for instance, they're making brushes at the end of sticks to pick up termites. They are doing several modifications of tools, ok, and you find this in other species as well. So new Canadian neon crows are going to do several steps and modify things several times in order to fish for lavas, for instance, and you can also find this in capuchin monkeys. I mean, capuchin monkeys have an impressive repertoire of tool use, stick use and so on and so forth. But the tricky part is to show that this improvement is transmitted. It is socially learned. You need to socially learn the improvement and that's where everybody's stuck.

Nicolas Claidiere: 26:52

So there has been a few experimental studies I'm thinking of Dean and colleagues some time ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I think it was 2012. And they were doing a study where you could open a box and you know you could do several modifications and that would bring you more and more rewards, more higher value rewards, uh, and what they found that was that chimpanzees were attracted to the box. So there was this kind of, uh, social attraction to the box and they would manipulate the box, but each individual would learn independently to open the different stages of the box. So the modifications happen, there is no doubt about it. So the chips are getting better and they're finding more complex behavior, more efficient behavior. As far as we know, they don't seem to be able to socially learn the modifications of the behavior, and that's where the technological evolution begins.

Andrew MacIntosh: 27:52

The second part of that that I was really curious about, and of course I have some background.

Andrew MacIntosh: 27:57

I mean, we talk about this in some of the classes that I teach as well, but it seems that it's not at all clear how much understanding some of these animals have of how the tools actually work.

Andrew MacIntosh: 28:16

And so it's. It's all good enough to be able to socially learn a behavior that uses a tool, but whether or not the animal actually understands its uh, maybe its function, but actually how it actually achieves that function, um, so there were some clever experiments, I think, with capuchins that show, um, they, they don't seem to understand why the tools that they're using work If you kind of change the apparatus so that they end up losing a nut based on which direction they're pulling through a tube. So it seems like there's some bits of information there that are missing, and I know that you've done a little bit of work on technological reasoning as well, and so I assume this kind of causal relationship between the tool that they're using and the function or the outcome that they get is. So where are we at on that now? Do you think that the chimpanzees or New Caledonian crows, I mean, is it still that we're unsure whether they actually understand why something like that works. Or have we gotten past that already?

Nicolas Claidiere: 29:09

I think it's a very tough question trying to know if an animal understands what she's doing In humans as well.

Andrew MacIntosh: 29:18

right, Because a lot of times we do things and have no idea why it works.

Nicolas Claidiere: 29:22

One interesting way, I think, to approach the problem, and one that we've been using, but mostly with humans in the case of technological reasoning. The one that we've been using, but mostly with humans in the case of technological reasoning, is to try to have individuals solve the problem. When you do small modifications, the question is if you understand how it works really. If you change something, then people non-human animals are supposed to adapt their behavior to the changes that you've done, and some of the changes can be completely irrelevant, in which case they shouldn't change anything. Some of them should be relevant. In that case, you expect individuals to adapt in a certain way and I think in New Caledonia and cross, for instance, there has been many studies showing that they I wouldn't interpret it as they understand what they're doing. So if you change something, they're going to change their behavior. I mean, maybe they're going to try once, but then they're going to adapt very quickly and find a different solution to solve the problem.

Nicolas Claidiere: 30:22

Now, with my experiments, with my experience in non-human primates, it's not so clear. It seems that as soon as you change something, it's going to take them a long time to adapt to the new conditions. I mean, we've been seeing that repeatedly in many different kinds of experiments and it's you know, it seems like it takes a really, really long time. It's not this kind of intuitive perception of what's going on and adaptation to new conditions. You know. They do the same thing. It doesn't work. They do it 10 times and then they start changing thinking. I don't know what they're thinking. They start exploring new behaviors to try to find a solution to a problem.

Nicolas Claidiere: 31:04

It seems to be very, very different, I think one aspect of human technological evolution is this capacity to understand cause and effects and how it works, and that's very powerful for us to build new technologies.

Andrew MacIntosh: 31:18

Yeah okay, I know a lot of these are kind of hard concepts and I've seen there's a lot of debate, even, you know, going back to the origins of social learning studies, like all of the different, I always got put off a little bit by all of the different definitions and how careful people are about defining what it means to copy, and it seemed to be so many different variations on that theme. But I want to transition a little bit because you, as you, you just started talking about your own experience and a lot of that, at least for sure in the last 10 years and more than that, has been with baboons and I wonder if you could answer for me why are baboons a good model for studying social cognition?

Nicolas Claidiere: 32:06

So we study guinea baboons and I have become quite fond of them. I think they're very interesting for social learning experiments and social cognition in general because they have a sort of very complex hierarchical social structure. So they form this beautiful work by Julia Julia Fisher at the DPZ in Germany and she showed that they have one male units. So you have usually one big male with several females and kids around and these one male units are forming bigger units, like five, six of them, and then they form even bigger units with a lot of different gangs getting together up to 200 or 300 individuals in the wild, and so they have this sort of complex hierarchical structure.

Nicolas Claidiere: 33:01

But the Guinea baboons also have horizontal transfers between units, so the females are going to move from males, from different males, and males are also forming coalitions. So there is a lot of social dynamics compared to some other species of baboons or non-human primates, and there is a very interesting social dynamics and complex social relationships. I think that's one of the reasons why baboons have been the object of studies you know, dating back to the 80s the work by Dunbar and Whiten and Byrne and so on and so forth, trying to study human evolution and thinking that baboons were a good model of human evolution Because they have this complex social structure that is also a bit flexible and that's very interesting to understand. I think human social evolution flexible.

Andrew MacIntosh: 33:51

That's very interesting to understand, I think. Human social evolution yeah, that's right. Even decades before that, people studying wild baboons as a model for human evolution because they assume they occupy similar ecological niches in the kind of savannah transitions in Africa. They do have a very special place, I think, in the history of primatology, but I don't necessarily see that many labs investigating cognition in baboons. And so are there. Sorry, I think we're the only ones. You're the only. Okay, I was going to confirm that. Do you have any other? Any comments out there?

Nicolas Claidiere: 34:26

Well, I mean again, julia Fisher is doing some very interesting work with baboons in Senegal, and she's also interested in cognitive evolution, for sure. But the sort of experiment that we do with touchscreens and everything, I mean we are the only lab using this with baboons.

Andrew MacIntosh: 34:45

So can you maybe describe how that place got started? So I believe that this was, if I'm not wrong, was started by Joël Fagol, it was.

Nicolas Claidiere: 34:54

So Joël has been developing systems to study non-human primates more or less automatically. So at the beginning it was joysticks on a computer and then progressively move to touchscreens. And in 2008, he opened this amazing place close to Marseille in France, where you have a group of baboons and they can freely go into these sort of little testing cubicles where you have a touchscreen and the baboons are recognized by the computer. They can go there whenever they want. It's completely free and they're recognized by the computer and you can perform experiments on on a touchscreen. And when joel opened this in 2008, it was the only one who was being able to have this sort of free ranging group of baboons interacting with the computers. And since then a few teams have started using this system. But it's proved very successful and very interesting because there are a lot of constraints that just disappear with this system so often when you're studying non-human primates in the lab you have testing sessions.

Nicolas Claidiere: 36:11

So twice a day, say between 10 and 12 and 2 and 4 usually when you're studying non-human primates in the lab, you have a testing session. So you know, twice a day say between 10 and 12, and 2 and 4 usually you're either taking the monkey and bringing them to a testing chamber or you're asking them to come over. So you know you're in your testing lab and you're asking the monkeys can you come, please do an experiment for me? And they come and they go when they want, if they want. Um, so that's one way of doing it and it's very time consuming and it's very thoughtful and difficult. Uh, and Joel's lab is completely different, because the baboons can go whenever they want and therefore what you realize is that they're going to go maybe for one hour, two hours a day. They get a small foot or what.

Nicolas Claidiere: 36:54

Every time they do something, a correct response, and they are going to come and go all day long. You know they come maybe for one minute and then they leave. They come maybe for five minutes and then they leave, but that's very natural, that's very spontaneous. That's very spontaneous. That's what you observe in the wild. You know they're walking around and then they start foraging for a bit and then they move on to something else.

Nicolas Claidiere: 37:18

So when you think about the way in which we are doing research in the traditional way, when you're taking the monkeys for like 10 minutes or 15 minutes, it's way too long. I mean they want to do something else, so they're going to pay attention for a very short amount of time and then you put them back in the group and you can't test them again and they want to come back but it's gone. I mean you know the opportunity is gone. So I think a lot of the difficulties we have in a traditional way of conducting experiments are linked to that, to the fact that the way in which we are doing them is not adapted to the sort of natural, spontaneous behavior of the non-human primates.

Andrew MacIntosh: 37:58

Yeah, this is fascinating. So just a brief kind of trip back to the joystick there. This is maybe something you've spoken with him about, but how tricky is it to get a baboon to use a joystick, and for what purpose? You'd have to ask Joanne, because I have no idea. I know that we have the guy that I started this podcast with, chris Martin, working now at Indianapolis Zoo.

Andrew MacIntosh: 38:22

He's trained his orangutans there not his orangutans, the orangutans that inhabit the zoo how to play some touchscreen-based games that they can then play with zoo visitors as well, so like pong, for example, where a ball is passing between, and that's kind of interesting. So obviously there's ways to get the animals to perform the behaviors for rewards once they understand what the task is. But how then have you or maybe you can comment on, like, if the animals are only coming potentially for a minute, I mean, how does that affect how you design, is not as motivated to do it? But if there's the chance that they only come for like a few seconds at a time or as as up to like I don't know five or ten minutes, how does that affect how you actually design the tasks?

Nicolas Claidiere: 39:19

um, so it it makes a big difference. So you have to think about experiments in terms of very short trials, uh, and we're usually between five and ten seconds. So we we don't do like minute long things because they're not going to stay for one minute in many, in many cases. So it's it's very short trials where you're asking them a sort of very simple question can you memorize this? Can you detect a difference? Can Can you respond based on what the other individual has just done? Things like this. But that's right.

Nicolas Claidiere: 39:58

So, if you think, a lot of the experiments in humans because we're doing comparative work, so we're also studying humans and children, and a lot of the studies in humans and children are based on like, and a lot of the studies in humans and children are based on like I don't know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, trying to do the same task over and over again, like learning to discriminate between colors or something, and we can't do that with baboons. So you have to think of much shorter trials, just one tiny question that they can do in like 5 or 10 seconds. The big advantage is that we are going to get thousands of trials. So what you do is you're cutting the long experiment into a shorter session, and then you're asking the question repeatedly.

Nicolas Claidiere: 40:45

And literally, our baboons are doing on average close to a thousand trials a day per individual. So you know, I mean you cannot send a lot of these tiny questions, it's incredible.

Andrew MacIntosh: 40:58

I was reading an abstract for one of your papers from a while ago about it's going back to the cultural evolution part, but it was like here, using nearly half a million experimental trials performed by a group of. I mean, you don't usually see things like half a million data trials performed by a group of I mean, you don't usually see things like half a million data points in primatology or just anyway, animal cognition studies. So in that sense it really is remarkable, isn't it? It is. I think it's amazing.

Nicolas Claidiere: 41:22

I was completely blown away. So the first time I visited Joel's lab, I was just amazed by what we could do. I had so many ideas, but this paper is the outcome of this meeting. I came to the lab for half a day I was giving a seminar and I visited the lab and I came out of it saying, look, I mean we have to do this experiment. I have this experiment on cultural transmission. This is the only place I can do it. I would never dream of doing this in my lab, because it takes so much time to train the monkeys to do stuff, but here it's finally possible. We can do amazing stuff, and that's right. We did this experiment several times over the years and we realized at some point that we had half a million trials of this memory task.

Andrew MacIntosh: 42:09

Well, I think you have to explain the task now, just for people that have a perspective. Yeah, so it's it's a.

Nicolas Claidiere: 42:15

It's a very easy task. So we are talking about short trials and, uh, what happens is you, you have to memorize the position. It's a sort of memory game. You have four squares that are red in a grid of 16, so it's a 4x4 grid. All the squares are white, except four of them that are red, and they appear and disappear, and then you just have to touch the square that were read previously. Okay, so it's like finding, you know, finding the cards in the memory game. And the baboons learned to do that. It took us a month to train them to learn to do this. So we have very progressive stages. They first have to remember the position of one square, and then two squares, and then three squares, and then finally four squares.

Andrew MacIntosh: 42:58

Uh, but once they've learned that they, you know it's it's a very easy task.

Nicolas Claidiere: 43:03

They like it, it's, it's, it's fine. I mean, it's funny. And uh, you know the squares are always in a different place, they're random positions. So they learned to do that and they were. You know, the squares are always in a different place, they're random positions. So they learned to do that and they were. You know, they loved doing it, and so we managed to get them to do that for several sessions in different experiments, and then we had this huge number of random trials.

Nicolas Claidiere: 43:21

And what comes with this huge number of trials is that you can look at things in a very detailed way. So what I find is that you often get many effects of an experiment. So in that case what we wanted to see was what kind of shape they would memorize better, and then what we can study. That is very difficult to study in other labs where you have less. A smaller amount of trials is sort of secondary effect.

Nicolas Claidiere: 43:53

So we realized in some experiments that you have an effect of the presence of another individual. So if you're alone, you're behaving slightly differently from when you're next to another baboon, and that depends on the status of the baboon. If it's dominant or not dominant, it's going to affect your own behavior and looking at this is only possible when you have a huge number of trials, because you become very, very precise at estimating reaction times or the amount of correct responses and so on, and because you become very, very precise, you can start describing very small effects that are secondary to your experiment, that are still there and exist that's fascinating and I imagine there's both advantages and disadvantages of that.

Andrew MacIntosh: 44:38

So I mean, I just wonder if you researchers are ever out there at the window like, oh, this, you know, we need this baboon to do some trials today. But then there's like another dominant individual right there and you're thinking, no, don't get closer because it's going to mess up the. So you can't control that social dynamic, right, and the benefit of having so many different trials is you can eventually control for those kinds of compounds, I guess. But the advantages are also you get. I think when you were here in Japan, you were talking about how you can recreate to a high fidelity the social networks of the animals as well, and so what are the kind of other not even related to the cognitive studies that you're doing, but what are the kind of other data that you can get from this kind of a system?

Nicolas Claidiere: 45:24

so we, we started realizing. So you're right. I mean, one of the one of the difficulty or main limitation of the the system is that you, you can't control what the baboons are doing. Uh, so literally they do what they want. So you have to make them interested in your experiment.

Andrew MacIntosh: 45:43

You want them to come to your experiment and then, by the way, I have a funny story about that baboons doing what they want. I was in northern ghana during my master's degree research and I visited this national park area called Mule and they have a little tourist like a hotel resort place that I was staying at and there was a I think there was a. There was a pool or kind of a deck area with a bunch of tables and then the baboons the local baboons would roll through pretty much daily and one got up on a table, really scared the tourists away, grabbed one of the glass bottles of Coca-Cola and started sipping out of the straw. So I imagine when baboons have the free right of way to do whatever they want, it can get a little funny. But I'm sorry for interrupting your story.

Nicolas Claidiere: 46:27

No, it's a funny story, but that's right, because they're doing what they want, then we can't impose I mean, we even have to make experiments that are attractive to them. So if you think about the memory that I was describing, then after a while they're just both doing the same thing. So after three weeks, four weeks doing these memory tasks, they're just bored by it and then they are going to stop doing the experiments because they're afraid to do whatever they want and therefore what happens is we have to renew and change the experiment because otherwise they just stop coming, they just stop doing experiments. So that's one of the main limitations, and I forgot the rest of your question. That's one of the main limitations and I forgot the rest of your question.

Andrew MacIntosh: 47:12

I think we were talking about the advantages. So what were the other kind of bits of information that you can pull out of doing these kinds of experiments. But having all of the animals are, I imagine they're chipped so they have wearable tech. They can track movements. You can track interactions and then you can track when they're using the machines and who with that's right. Movements. You could track interactions and then you can track when they're using the machines and who with things like that.

Nicolas Claidiere: 47:33

Yeah, so, yes, I mean so we realized because of this spontaneous dynamics, uh, one of the one of the advantage of the system is that you can actually know where the individuals are and when they're coming to do experiments, uh, and based on that, you can extract information from the group. So we realized very early on, um, when I started working at the lab, that we start studying social network uh, because baboons uh behave as a group. I mean, they behave like in their natural environment, so they, their behavior is synchronous. So when one individual starts going to, uh to cubicles, then it's going to attract other individuals, so they go in a group and with their close friends, so you can look at who is coming next to whom at what time, and then you can reconstruct the social network. And we've been doing this by looking at, you know, having people looking at the beehives and who's grooming whom, and you realize that, based on the grooming network, you realize that you can get the same network using the computers.

Nicolas Claidiere: 48:41

At the same time, we also looked at when an individual is doing an experiment and gets replaced by another one very, very soon, in 30 seconds. So that's a displacement and that's something that is typical of a sort of agonistic interaction, dominance interaction, one individual commit to replace another individual in a spot and, looking at this, you can reconstruct the dominance hierarchy of the baboons. So that means that the baboons are using this system. This system is part of their environment. I'm going to say natural environment. It's a natural fake environment, but it's part of their place, it's their house, it's where they go every day for a few hours to gain some food and do some experiments. And again, we're starting a new PhD project on curiosity and I'm very excited about it because I think a large part of why they're coming they're interested in the experiments and they want, you know, to have this experience and these cognitive tasks and cognitive challenges that are stimulating in a captive environment.

Andrew MacIntosh: 49:57

Yeah, do you see a lot of variation? I mean, I guess you must. You have a lot of individuals, so there should be a lot of variation in who's using the tasks.

Nicolas Claidiere: 50:19

Some are not. Dominant males are not interested in experiments Not very surprisingly. Following the groups and looking at the females and so on, that's right. And you get a lot of variation with age as well. So you have a sort of peak adolescence crisis where individuals are very keen to come and do experiments. But we get individuals from all age ranges, but they come more or less. It's also very dependent on their social position, because that also gives them access to more interesting food or not, so they tend to adjust based on that. So there is a lot of variation.

Nicolas Claidiere: 50:59

But when we do an experiment for long enough I would say about a month you realize that you get all the individuals to come and do the experiment. Even the dominant males would do like one trial a day, maybe two to 1,000 for their neighbor, but after some time they come in and they do some. So we get everybody and we also get everybody next to everybody else. So even though there is this social structure, they have their close friends and they have the individual they're quite far from after some time. We get every pair, every combination of individuals coming next to each other in different testing cubicles. So that means that it's also very flexible. I mean it's not like a very strong repulsion for individuals. They like each other. They just tend not to be next to each other, but it's not a very strong repulsion.

Andrew MacIntosh: 51:57

When you were here in Japan it's about a month ago now, I guess you gave a talk about I guess in a way it was kind of an unconventional study, because I don't think you that word, unconventional might be relevant to the topic, but it was unconventional in the sense that I think you started, if I'm not wrong, you started trying to test something else that didn't work, but then the result was something potentially even more interesting, which was the finding that there may be conventions in the baboons there. So can you talk about that?

Nicolas Claidiere: 52:28

Yes, I mean, for me it was a very exciting moment because you're very happy in science when you discover something and you're like, wow, this is exciting and you have to keep an open mind and that's you know. That's what I'm trying to do, and so we really wanted to do an experiment on imitation. Because of this social learning literature, I wanted to check if the baboons could imitate each other. So I gave them a task where you have two baboons and they are very close to each other and they can see each other's screen, and you present two colours say blue and yellow to one baboon and the baboon can pick whatever she wants, and then the two colours appear on the name screen and the other baboon has to choose the same colour as the first one to be rewarded. So the first baboon chooses yellow and the other baboon has to choose the same color as the first one to be rewarded. So the first baboon chooses yellow and the other one chooses yellow. They both get a reward at the same time. They choose the same color and they're not rewarded.

Nicolas Claidiere: 53:29

And my idea was that they were going to look at what the other individual is doing, so the second one, the chooser, would just look at what the other individual is doing and choose a color based on what the first one was doing. But at the end of the experiment we used an opaque partition that we slided in between the two baboons so they couldn't see each other anymore, and we realized that they were as good as, even better than, with the transparent partition, when they could see each other. So obviously it wasn't anything linked to imitation or looking at the other individual and we realized that they had developed this sort of systematic build to allow them to choose a different color. So, for instance, they would choose yellow over all the other colors, so yellow over blue, yellow over purple, and so on and so forth. Blue, for instance, was the least chosen color, so it was almost never chosen, and so on and so forth. So they organized the color in a form of structure that allowed them to solve the task.

Nicolas Claidiere: 54:37

That is very typical of conventions, and we did several experiments to show that it was similar to human experiments. But I think there was this incredible moment where you realised the experiment didn't work as planned. You were not studying the thing that you were supposed to do. They found something more interesting in your experiment that you didn't think about, and it was very exciting to study and to work out what was going on. How did they manage to solve this task? At the beginning, I didn't understand what was going on and it was a sort of eureka moment when you ah, now I understand what's going on. So that was a very interesting moment. I think it's one of the things that we you know, we leave for scientists to discover new things you don't expect. Yeah, that was one of them.

Andrew MacIntosh: 55:29

Yeah, so I mean, why? Why do you think so? Maybe you presumably did these experiments or repeated them, but yellow, you said, was kind of this dominant color that came out. Do you have any idea? What is it that would bias them in that way for this case? So maybe I'll throw out an example, and I don't know, you can tell me if this is also a convention or not.

Andrew MacIntosh: 55:51

But humans, when we're ordering things, we tend to order things, and especially maybe this is true of people who have writing systems that move from left to right, but we tend to order things, and especially maybe this is true of people who have writing systems that move from left to right, but we tend to order things from left to right.

Andrew MacIntosh: 56:06

In Japan, where I'm based, there may be some variations, because the traditional way to write is from the top to bottom and right to left, and so there may be ways of ordering things based on that, but it seems to be pretty universal that we kind of order things from left to right and top down.

Andrew MacIntosh: 56:31

And then some of my colleagues here in Kyoto University showed with the chimpanzees that they also seem to order things from left to right and top down, especially when it comes to like hierarchies too. So they had some clever experiments where they either match the expectations of the subject or mismatch them by putting a dominant individual on top of a subordinate individual on a touch on a screen Right, and then they had to like, match some image. It was just a matching task, um, and then they showed that that was fine when they reversed it. So the subordinate was on top and the dominant was on the bottom. The chimpanzees were slower at matching, and so it seems to be a violation of the expectation of dominance. Individuals should be on the top. If we number things or order things in a list from left to right, that, I guess, would be an example of a convention. If we share it with other species that are not humans, I'm not sure it satisfies convention anymore, because it might be something more fundamental convention anymore, because it might be something more fundamental, but right.

Nicolas Claidiere: 57:22

So the, the conventions are based on a coordination problem. So the, the very typical example is driving on the right and side of the road on the left, and it's a coordination problem, because if you're driving on the left when everybody's driving on the right, you have a problem, uh. So, for instance, in writing system, uh, you have a coordination problem because everybody needs to write in the same direction in order to solve the task. But if we are talking about ordering books on your bookshelves, then it's not a coordination problem. It just depends on what you prefer. So there's this sort of subtle change between coordination to individual sort of preferences. Of course, a lot of Some preferences are more or less universal. They could be based on lots of different things the fact that you're right-handed, or many people are right-handed versus left-handed. It could have an impact in your writing system and that could have an impact on the way in which you order things and so on and so forth.

Nicolas Claidiere: 58:22

But in the case of the baboons, why yellow was chosen, I think, is I have a very banal and not interesting intention. So in our system, we use red as a sign. That is a thing to reward. So it's often a target that you have to touch to solve the task, and green is used as a feedback, negative feedback, saying you missed. You missed the task. So I think they simply they simply went for the thing that was closest to red. So we got orange and yellow on top and blue at the bottom, which makes a lot of sense when you think about the environment and the way in which they've been using these computers. So I don't think there's. I mean, there might be something that is, you know, generally shared with baboons about, or non-human primates about, red or something like this, but we can't say anything about it. You know, in our setup, I see, but more generally in conventions, they're governed by individual preferences.

Nicolas Claidiere: 59:28

Solving this coordination problem is going to rely on sort of intuitive ideas that people have on how to solve them.

Nicolas Claidiere: 59:32

So if you think about a simple coordination problem, you need to set up a meeting with someone you know you're in a city Suppose you don't have cell phone.

Nicolas Claidiere: 59:43

You know, back in the old days when we were very, very young, you need to find a place where you're going to meet that person. The first idea that comes to mind would be the center of the city, the church, whatever the temple, something that is very clear and you can meet that person there because you're thinking that she's thinking that you know. So you're going to solve that coordination problem based on your intuitions. So what I'm saying is that conventions can be based on intuitions because they are going to be based on this solving this coordination problems, but they can also go against. So you can also set up a convention that is against your intuitions and then, once it's set up, it's very hard to change because everybody is solving the coordination problem in the same way, therefore changing it. Think about driving. If you want to force the UK to change their driving practice to the right side, as it should be, then it's going to be tough. That's it.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:00:51

I was wondering and I didn't think of it when you were presenting, but I did ask that question about the colors but had you considered replicating with different kinds of stimuli? So what if you used symbols, for example? Would you expect similar kind of results in this emergence of conventions?

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:01:10

That's right. So at the beginning we were thinking that, I mean, we weren't sure it was linked to colors. So we replicated it with black and white shapes, of different shapes, and we did, you know, around 10, with different stimuli every time, and we always get the same result. That's because we have a very clear understanding of what's going on and how they solve this problem. They get a reward when they manage to solve the task and that's going to inform their previous choice. So it makes a lot of sense. We know how they solve the coordination problem and where we get the results. But you're right, I mean, at the beginning, your sort of intuitions about what the other person chooses is going to inform the outcome of the study, that's for sure.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:02:00

Are there now other examples of this, of conventions in other species, in other situations or conditions?

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:02:07

I think that's one outcome of the paper. There are very few examples of conventions in the white. I think one study by Susan Perry on conventions in white-faced monkeys is probably the most well-known and emblematic study about white.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:02:24

So we know there are some examples. But I think, given that it was very spontaneous in our setup, I mean they came up with these conventions very easily, very quickly, and they're not based on very complex thinking. I mean you can explain them in sort of simple reinforcement. You don't need to have ideas about what the other individual is thinking, so you don't have theory of mind like this. So we expect conventions to be very widespread. I think they just understudied. I think one outcome of the study that that should be everywhere. But I don't think people have tried to study them very softly. But if we do, my expectation is they're going to be everywhere.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:03:09

Yeah, that's really interesting. It seems so often that we make these discoveries that just show how potentially unremarkable the behaviors are, or at least the kind of root of the behavior seems to be something so simple that we hadn't considered before, which means, of course, other species are going to have it. So it'll be really interesting to see as we go there. So I think we can start to kind of wind this conversation down a little bit, but before we do that I have some questions that I was given by an old acquaintance of yours potentially by Melanie.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:03:44

Duvall. I asked and she provided me a few questions that I'm going to throw at you here Someone who's going to be coming to work with me a little bit starting in January, and so we were surprised to learn that we each have relationships with you and thought it'd be a good opportunity to kind of share. So one thing that she asked, which I thought was kind of interesting and it might help us understand this conversation as well, is what's the kind of pathway for you between queenless ants and guinea baboons? It's very complicated.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:04:16

It's not a straight line. It's a very complicated. It's not a straight line, it's a lot of detours?

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:04:27

We don't like straight lines here on the podcast, so that's okay. So I was okay. When I started my studies, I was very interested in biology. I've always been interested in biology and I wanted to study the evolution of social behavior and in particular, in insects, bees, wasps. I really wanted to understand how individuals were capable of forming groups and how evolution would favor the evolution of groups, and I was really going for that. I was super keen. I did my going for that. I was super keen. I did my internships on that.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:05:03

And then there was this random thing that happened I had to take a course because I needed more credits and I couldn't find anything that I wanted to do. So my wife convinced me to choose cognitive science because she was doing something in cognitive science. I knew nothing about cognitive science, I had no idea whatsoever. So I took cognitive science and part of it was an internship, and I chose neuroscience and I wasn't really excited with that. And then there was philosophy. I said, oh, let's go for philosophy.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:05:40

And I met Dan Sperber and I had to do an internship with Dan. And that was a life-changing moment because Dan absolutely convinced me that we could study human behavior. You know this interaction between biological evolution and cultural evolution and understanding this would really benefit from people interested in biological evolution and cultural evolution, and understanding this would really benefit from people interested in biological evolution. And so he suggested that I completely change my career and start studying social learning in humans and cultural evolution. And I found this really exciting because at the time nobody was working on this. So all the things we've been talking about the work by Andy White on non-human primates was just coming out.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:06:24

I think it was almost the same year I decided to start working with Dan, so it was really the very, very early beginning and there was a lot of theories worked by Rob Boyd and Patricia Son and Cavadis, fawza and Feldman, and there were biologists interested in modeling control evolution. But that also was very small and nobody was looking at it. So it was very exciting. We could feel that there was this very interesting interaction that was going to take place and I wanted to be a part of it. And by the end of my PhD, you know, they were starting to get studies on non-human primates and social learning and so I managed to do a postdoc with Andy Whiten. It was the first time I met a monkey. That was very late. I was doing my postdoc. I wasn't introduced to primatology before that. He was kind enough to take me on board with absolutely no experience whatsoever, and I met Valérie, who was now a researcher in the CNRS in Strasbourg, and she taught me what I know today about non-human primates.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:07:30

I had no idea.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:07:31

She taught me how to train them, how to perform experiments and everything, and that was incredible. I mean, I learned so many things. It was really exciting. And then, finally, I met Joël Fagot, where I said, oh my God, all these experiments I've always dreamed about. That was the start of my composition. So it's a long, winding road through biology, philosophy and finally psychology and creative science. Yes, Fantastic.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:08:07

I love the.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:08:09

In some ways it can kind of look like a pinball bouncing between these really influential people you know, but along the way it sounds like you've had some really great mentorship as well, and so I wonder maybe this is not her question, but my question is like have you tried to kind of sit down and integrate all the ways that these people influenced you and how you kind of take those lessons and apply them in your own lab now? Um, because it's presumably you also have your own set of students and ways to influence.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:08:36

They influenced you so I, I found the three, so my three uh mentors were dan sperber, andy whiten and joel fago, and they're very, very different.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:08:50

They're completely uh, and every time it it works so well. I learned so much, uh, different levels that I don't know I can't say by them. I feel like I'm between the three of them. I'm trying to be, you know, I'm trying to be, but I think everybody is different. So I think I have my own kind of mentorship.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:09:20

But what I would recommend for people like Melanie who are coming is to get different people, because you can learn very different experiences and that's very important, because you see things you know from different perspectives and that opens your mind to a lot of different possibilities and also you don't get focused on the same thing. So by the end of your PhD you know you have that particular question you're really interested in and you don't want to see anything else. And then you broaden your mind and you realize that you know the world is bigger than that and you can study many different things and there are other people who are doing things differently and they're also interesting. You can study many different things and there are other people who are doing things differently and they're also interesting For me.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:10:05

Yeah, that was really important for me that's great advice and you also answered one of her last questions, which is really your advice for students.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:10:12

But I totally agree with that one and I myself have kind of bounced around a little bit, not only in topics but also the species Never studied queenless ants. So that's something you've got on me, but maybe there's still time, right, there's still time. So maybe last question from me you mentioned a little bit earlier on you're getting excited about some new experiments that you're designing to work on and have a new student coming in to work on curiosity. I think you know staying curious is part of the theme coming out of the last couple of minutes of this episode, but do you want to just maybe leave us off with what's the deal with curiosity, what's the angle for the studies and what do we know and not know about? And, to be honest, I think I've seen on Twitter some people advertising positions for graduate students to come and study curiosity and species X of primates somewhere in the world. So yeah, I wonder if maybe this is something that's emerging now.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:11:09

I wonder too. I mean, we've been, we've wanted to to study. So oftentimes people come to me and they ask me so why are baboons coming and doing your experiments? It's a food reward, okay, so they get food and that's one aspect of it, but I'm convinced it's not the exact and I think a lot of it is linked to this uh station that you get when you're actually solving a problem or you know, know, managing to find a solution, and that's also one aspect of it. And I think we've always wanted to study this and this is linked to curiosity. Do you want to explore your environment? Do you want to find new things? And that student came up with this idea of studying curiosity, so maybe it's the right time to do that. I saw also ads after we started. So the same, as you know, studying curiosity is.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:12:10

X.

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:12:10

So I think it's an interesting aspect to link to social learning though, because, again, to get cultural evolution going, you need innovation and the transmission of innovation. And innovation are going to be based on individuals who are exploring the environment and finding new ways to solve old problems or new problems that they can solve, and that aspect is certainly linked to curiosity, but right now I don't know what's going to come out of it. I have no idea what we're going to do. I don't have a very clear definition of curiosity or anything.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:12:49

We're going to see Sounds fascinating, and it made me wonder have you ever so you have? These baboons are capable of coming to these experimental booths whenever they feel like it. They get the food reward. You assume, or you hypothesize, that maybe they get a cognitive reward as well. Have you ever allowed, did the, have you ever allowed the baboons to choose the tasks that they have in front of them, or are they always kind of set with uh?

Nicolas Claidiere: 1:13:17

no, that's one of the things that we want to do, uh is is to look at, uh, what would they choose when they have the choice? So we need to teach them that they can choose the task, yeah, and then, uh, you know, give them different choices. Uh, do you want to do this task or that task? Are you going to change or are you going to sit there on the same one? If I give you an easy but very, you know, boring, I don't know, touch the right square. There's just something that is, uh, more challenging but also more exciting. Uh, try to solve this problem, memorize this, or find the target in the environment, or something like that. Uh, so that's the sort of ideas we're going for. That, you know, I don't know what we're going to do.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:14:01

Yeah, that sounds cool. I was thinking or it just popped into my mind these studies by Rob Hampton's group about metamemory as well, where the animals have the option to either take a test or kind of phone a friend in a way like get a little bit of memory helped if they're not confident in their own abilities. And I wonder if maybe the baboons would have some of that as well, Like if you had a choice in front of them. They may be more interested in some tasks rather than others, but they also may feel more prepared to do some tasks over others as well, and so I wonder what kind of information can come out of that line of experimentation. I'm curious, you're curious, well, and I was very curious. So thank you for satisfying my curiosity here. Nico, on the podcast, hope to talk to you soon. Me too. Yes, thank you so much.