Food cleaning behavior has been observed among laboratory squirrel monkeys. A Wilcoxon signed-ranks test showed that significantly more cleaning behavior occurred when hard monkey chow pellets and soft fruit were coated with edible debris. Monkeys removed fewer pieces of fruit from a food crock containing fruit coated with edible debris in a timed test. A principal component analysis of the food cleaning behaviors showed two underlying correlated factors. The first factor was the use of the body to clean food. The second factor was the use of the environment to clean food. Two groups of squirrel monkeys, one without previous learners and one with previous learners, were subjects in a fishing study. The presence of previous learners in the social group was not significant for monkeys fishing in water filled crocks. But there was a significant difference in the number of fishing attempts made by the No Previous Learners Group when fishing in wading pools. The Previous Learners group did not make significantly more fishing attempts fishing in wading pools than in crocks. A significant difference was observed in fishing attempts during Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the wading pool experiment for both groups. All monkeys in the group fishing experiments ate fish when it could be obtained. Monkeys who did not learn to fish successfully learned alternative behaviors to obtain fish. The Previous Learners group in the wading pool experiment were subjects in a more difficult fishing test. Significantly fewer fishing attempts were made but the number of monkeys that caught fish was larger. Caged squirrel monkeys scored a lower percentage of fishing attempts than squirrel monkeys living in a social group. While Cebus monkeys caught fish, unlike squirrel monkeys, they did not attempt to eat them.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the cognitive processes of social learning from the bottom up. In the field of comparative psychology, an overemphasis on understanding complex cognitive processes in nonhuman animals (e.g. empathy, imitation), may be detrimental to the study of simpler mechanisms. In this thesis, I report five studies of simple cognitive processes related to social learning. A series of experiments with human children and capuchin monkeys (Sapajus sp.), examined action imitation and identified a possible role for associative learning in the development of this ability. An analysis of observational data from captive capuchins explored a number of lesser-studied social learning phenomena, including behavioural synchrony, the neighbour effect, and group-size effects. The results of this study emphasise the importance of exploring behaviour at a number of levels to appreciate the dynamic nature of social influence. Two final experiments examined social contagion in capuchin monkeys, and highlight the importance of describing the relationship between behaviour and emotion to properly understand more complex social cognition. Together, these studies demonstrate how approaching human and nonhuman behaviour from the bottom up, as well as from the top down, can contribute to a better comparative science of social learning.