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Curious about curiosity: a comparative study on curiosity in vervet monkeys and human children

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Curiosity is the urge to find out something new. It is crucial for learning about one’s environment, and arguably the reason to why humans thrive in almost every habitat on earth. To date, an outstanding evolutionary question is: to what extent human curiosity is shared with other animals? Moreover, if curiosity is the reason to why some species successfully adapt to fast changing environments, like those caused by urbanization. Here I present a new initiative to study curiosity in humans and a non-human primate, vervet monkeys, a species recognized for the colonization of urban areas. The project is divided into two parts. In Part A, I will compare curiosity between monkeys living in natural-, urban and captive environments. I will focus on how young individuals seek new information and thereby measure curiosity through a set of tests presenting the monkeys with various novel situations: foods, objects, unfamiliar social partners and novel sounds. Part B, will cross the boundaries between primatology and anthropology, as I apply the same empirical tests of curiosity on human infants and small children. Whilst most studies on curiosity in humans have targeted western industrialized cultures, I aim to use a cross-cultural approach, which compares curiosity in children from Europe to those growing up in an African hunter-gatherer community. This critical multidisciplinary perspective will unravel phylogenetic similarities and improve our understanding of the evolutionary roots of human curiosity. Discovering how curiosity develops across cultures will have direct implications for our society, as supporting curiosity in children is one of the main tasks for modern pedagogy.

The project “Curious about curiosity: a comparative study on curiosity in vervet monkeys and human children” aimed to investigate how behavioural flexibility can underlie how we, humans together with our primate relatives manage environmental challenges. To do so the project focused on understanding underpinning mechanisms of curiosity and innovation tendency in vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) that have evolutionary recently (only 15 years ago) experienced urbanization of their native habitat. We took a cross-habitat approach comparing individuals from three different environments, and our results revealed differences in “object curiosity” depending on which habitat monkeys had grown up in: captive vervet monkeys were significantly more explorative than both urban and wild troops, suggesting that positive experiences with humans and lack of predation influence information seeking. Additionally, we investigated whether anthropogenic experiences drive behavioural flexibility required to innovate new solutions to technical problems. With a field experiment we quantified three traits encompassing individuals’ behavioural flexibility: switch tendency, innovativeness, and learning sensitivity. We found that individuals’ switch tendency and innovativeness were not explained by urban experience (how often monkeys raid human food sources). Our findings so far contrast with the hypothesis that urbanization selects for behavioural flexibility, our findings instead imply that vervet monkeys already had the sufficient behavioural flexibility and cognitive capacities to successfully exploit the urban habitat. Findings can be read at the Urban Vervet Projects webpage: https://urbanvervetproject.weebly.com/

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