By investigating the cognitive capacities of non-human primates, we can begin to understand the cognitive capacities of the evolutionary ancestors we share with these species. While there is a great deal of research exploring the socio-cognitive abilities of simian primates, prosimians have not been sufficiently studied. Without data from these species, our knowledge about the evolution of the primate mind is limited to the common ancestor shared between simian primates only, precluding understanding of the phylogenetic origins of certain phenomena. I explored the socio-cognitive capacities of lemurs, a type of prosimian primate. I studied several areas of social cognition related to social referencing, defined as the ability to use and seek out social information when appraising objects or events. As social referencing is a popular subject in both human developmental and non-human primate literature, I aimed to determine how prosimians’ capacities compare. My research was conducted with captive lemurs of three species: Eulemur fulvus fulvus, Eulemur macaco macaco, and Eulemur fulvus rufus. I found that lemurs use social cues regarding food palatability to modify their own feeding behaviour and that they visually attend to conspecifics differently when presented with novel, as compared to familiar, foods. Lemurs also visually referred to a human experimenter’s face when presented with an anomalous interaction and went on to engage in gaze alternation. Lemurs failed to use information about the experimenter’s attentional state, however, when modifying their use of a trained gesture. Finally, I found that lemurs are able to visually co-orient with conspecifics, correctly prioritising information from the head over that from the body, and that they go on to use conspecific gaze to locate hidden resources. These results show that lemurs are more cognitively advanced than previously thought and the origins of some social referencing skills may be phylogenetically older than previously hypothesised.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第24875号 / 理博第4985号 / 新制||理||1712(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科生物科学専攻 / (主査)准教授 MacIntosh Andrew, 教授 岡本 宗裕, 教授 明里 宏文 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Understanding the conditions that favour the evolution and maintenance of spiteful bacteriocin production combines two important questions from the fields of social evolution and microbiology. Spiteful behaviours, though, initially thought to be rare represent an important class of interactions between bacteria through the production of bacteriocins. Bacteriocins can be considered spiteful as they are costly to produce (in many cases requiring lysis) and are costly to sensitive bacteria (i.e. they are lethal). However, much about the ecology of spiteful behaviours and bacteriocin production remains unclear. Mathematical models have given us important insights into some conditions that should favour bacteriocin production, but few empirical studies exist supporting these results. In this thesis I use the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa (a prolific producer of bacteriocins), to examine conditions that favour bacteriocin production. I also investigate more specific elements about this system and toxin production in general. I find that bacteriocin production in P. aeruginosa closely follows predictions made from mathematical models under a range of different conditions (e.g. frequency, scale of competition, multiple social traits). I also find that resistance can evolve to bacteriocins and biological mechanisms such as the neutralisation of one’s own toxin can have important consequences. Finally, I consider bacteriocin as a policing trait testing predictions about the role that linkage plays in policing. This work represents a comprehensive study into the importance of bacteriocin production in bacteria.

The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Pongidae) among all other living species, is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor less than five million years ago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools. Of the primates, and even of the other Great Apes, they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users. Chimpanzees meet the criteria of working definitions of culture as originally devised for human beings in socio-cultural anthropology. They show sex differences in using tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees and human societies living by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow, at least for food-getting. Different communities of chimpanzees have different tool-kits, and not all of this regional and local variation can be explained by the varied physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely customs based on non-functionally derived and symbolically encoded traditions. Chimpanzees serve as heuristic, referential models for the reconstruction of cultural evolution in apes and humans from an ancestral hominoid. However, chimpanzees are not humans, and key differences exist between them, though many of these apparent contrasts remain to be explored empirically and theoretically.

Blind's autonomous cosmopolitanism is in four distinct layers. The first layer is her unusual everyday family background in the transition from Jewish tradition to the life of European revolutionaries in the 1840s and exile in Britain. The second layer is Blind's mental and moral development under Friederike's care and educational guidance according to the German concept of Bildung. The third layer comes from Mazzini's challenge for Blind to critically evaluate her German cultural heritage and the moral danger in the well-intended German concept of self-cultivation. Blind derives the fourth layer of her autonomous cosmopolitanism from Darwin's theory of evolution and Buckle's argument for a scientific approach to history. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection postulates sexual autonomy of the individual organism as a pre-condition for evolution by natural selection. Buckle's argument for a scientific approach to the study of history extends this concept by observing that the variety of geographical conditions around the globe gives rise to a diversity of cultures. The concept of social evolution is then anchored in the nature of interdependence between the individual and her society as it changes over time. Overall, my argument is that Blind's contribution to Victorian cosmopolitanism is to write about controversial subjects and to transcend ideological polarizations. She does this by transferring socio-political topics from the public domain into the intimacy of making "an immediate sensuous contact" with the individual reader. Her aim is to touch her reader's heart and to trust in her reader's ability and social will to care rather than to teach her about the individual poet's particular ideas of what should be done to solve problems.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, August 2015. / Burials within the Western Cape provide a valuable opportunity to understand past social practices during the Later Stone Age. The aim of this dissertation is to specifically study Western Cape LSA burials in such a way as to understand the social and cognitive processes of hunter-gatherers in that region. In order to do this the burials will be approached and studied from a social and cultural perspective. This will include applying a theoretical approach which lends itself to materiality. Certain techniques will be employed to aid the study of this research question, such as a temporal, spatial and structural analysis of the Western Cape burials. Once the temporal analysis is done, certain sections within time can more closely be studied and analysed. The spatial analysis will examine the sites on a regional scale. The interpretative discussion will concentrate on specific patterns and structural aspects of the burials. The above may illuminate a possible array of questions to be asked surrounding the Western Cape burials. This in turn will help in aiding a discussion surrounding the cognitive and social processes of hunter-gatherers in the Western Cape.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2017-07-18T12:07:01Z No. of bitstreams: 1 André Thiago Saconatto.pdf: 1486009 bytes, checksum: f522cd5ab54b2b544dc17d30dbf5b6c4 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-18T12:07:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 André Thiago Saconatto.pdf: 1486009 bytes, checksum: f522cd5ab54b2b544dc17d30dbf5b6c4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-06-28 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Cumulative cultural evolution is a phenomenon that has been studied by a different number of areas in science and it suppose not only transmission, but also the progressive accumulation and modification of behavioral repertoire that would allowed knowledge development that would not be possible to be produced by a single individual alone. A relevant question in those studies is which social learning mechanism(s) is/are accountable for cumulative cultural evolution to occur. The goal of this study was to verify the effect from three different transmission forms – access to the final product, access to the process and instruction – in an experimental task in order to determine if cumulative cultural evolution would occur. In order to reach the goal, a structure construction task using modeling clay and reed were used. The structure was evaluated by putting it over a wooden holder with a hole in the middle of it, and 50-gram weights were thrown above the structure, one by one, until it collapse or a weight touched the table. Two hundred graduates and undergraduates students participated in the research. Participants were distributed into four conditions: at the process condition, participants could see others building their structures; at the final product condition, participants could see the finished structure from the previous participant; at the instruction condition, participants had could read an instruction left from the previous participant. At each condition, there were eight groups, with eight participants in each group, and the next one at the building task followed each participant. At the control condition, eight participants did the building task eight times each (one participant was equivalent to a group from the other conditions). None of the participants had access to the structure evaluation result. The study’s result showed that there were not gradual increase in the number of weights held by the structures as the participants were replaced; and in the groups at the process condition there were a statistical significance in relation to control group, and the number of weights held by the structures this condition were smaller than in the other conditions. One hypotheses is the lack of access to the structure evaluation results by the participants to be a crucial point that contributed to the non-occurrence of the cumulative cultural evolution / A evolução cultural cumulativa, que supõe não só a transmissão, mas o acúmulo progressivo e a modificação de repertórios comportamentais – o que permitiria o desenvolvimento de conhecimentos que não são possíveis de serem produzidos por um único indivíduo –, tem sido estudada por diversas áreas do conhecimento. Uma questão relevante nesses estudos diz respeito a qual(ais) mecanismo(s) de aprendizagem social é(são) necessário(s) para que ocorra evolução cultural cumulativa. O objetivo deste estudo foi verificar o efeito de três diferentes formas de transmissão – acesso ao processo, acesso ao produto final e instrução – em uma tarefa experimental sobre a ocorrência ou não de evolução cultural cumulativa. Para isso, foi utilizado uma tarefa de construção de uma estrutura com massa de modelar e palha. A estrutura foi avaliada colocando-a em cima de um suporte de madeira com um buraco no meio, e sobre ela eram jogados, um por um, pesos de 50 gramas, até que ou a estrutura se rompesse ou um peso tocasse a mesa. Participaram do estudo 200 estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação. Os participantes foram distribuídos em quatro condições: na condição processo, os participantes viam um outro construir a estrutura; na condição produto final, os participantes tinham acesso visual à estrutura pronta do participante anterior; já na condição instrução, cada participante tinha acesso a uma instrução escrita deixada pelo participante que o procedera. Em cada uma dessas condições trabalharam oito grupos, com oito participantes cada, sendo que cada participante de um grupo seguia o outro na realização da tarefa. Na condição controle, oito participantes realizaram a tarefa de construir a estrutura por oito vezes seguidas (cada participante equivaleria a um grupo de oito participantes das demais condições). Nenhum participante teve acesso ao resultado da avaliação das estruturas. Os resultados mostraram que não houve, em nenhuma das condições, aumento gradativo do número de pesos suportados pelas estruturas conforme os participantes eram substituídos; e que nos grupos da condição processo houve diferença estatisticamente significativa em relação ao grupo controle, sendo este o grupo em que o número de pesos que as estruturas suportaram foram menores do que nas demais condições. Levanta-se a possibilidade de que o desconhecimento dos participantes em relação ao resultado da avaliação das estruturas seja um fator que contribua para a não ocorrência de evolução cumulativa

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed June 13, 2007). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 338-387).