The development of social attention in orangutans: Comparing peering behavior in wild and zoo-housed individuals

Social learning plays an essential role in all cultural processes, but the factors underlying its evolution remain poorly understood. To understand how socio-ecological conditions affect social learning, we compared peering behavior (i.e., close-range observation of conspecifics' activities) in wild and zoo-housed Sumatran orangutans. Using long-term data describing over 3,000 peering events (performed by 65 individuals across settings), we found similar age trajectories of peering in both settings. Moreover, immatures universally preferred to peer at older individuals and in learning-intense contexts. However, zoo-housed immatures peered more frequently, and more at non-mother individuals than their wild conspecifics, even when social opportunities were controlled for. Therefore, although similarities across settings suggest that the tendency to attend to social information has hard-wired components, the differences indicate that it is also influenced by social opportunities and the necessity to learn. Our comparative approach thus provides evidence that socio-ecological factors and genetic predispositions underlie the dynamics and evolution of culture.