Complex coordination through partner choice in baboons (Papio papio)

Coordination is a cornerstone of social life, enabling individuals to achieve collective goals and maintain group cohesion. In non-human primates, coordination can rely on flexible partner-dependent strategies, but the interplay between these strategies and partner choice remains poorly understood. Here, we introduced a complex anti-matching coordination task to a group of Guinea baboons (Papio papio), requiring individuals to select a different stimulus from their partner to be rewarded. We compared their performance with a previously studied matching task, where selecting the same stimulus as their partner was rewarded. While baboons adapted to both tasks, increasing their success rate over time, we found little evidence of partner-dependent strategies. Instead, they primarily relied on partner choice: individuals reorganized their social interactions to engage with compatible partners, avoiding those with conflicting strategies. This reorganization was particularly pronounced in the anti-matching phase, where partner choice was critical to maintain high performance.Our results demonstrate that, when possible, baboons prefer partner choice over partner dependent strategies to solve coordination problems. This highlights the importance of social flexibility and individual differences in shaping coordination outcomes, offering new insights into the cognitive and social mechanisms underpinning flexible cooperation in non-human primates.