Cinzia Trapanese

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle · Département Hommes, Natures, Sociétés

Foraging in seasonal environments can be cognitively demanding. Comparative studies have associated large brain size with a frugivorous diet. We investigated the ability of three semi-free-ranging primate species with different degrees of frugivory (Ntrials: Macaca tonkeana = 419, Macaca fascicularis = 197, Sapajus apella = 346) in developing a men...

Cannibalism is a quite common behaviour in animals that can have survival value when food is scarce or in the case of overpopulation. Conversely, cannibalism can also increase pathogen transmission and reduce fitness. In primates, some cases of cannibalism are associated with infanticide or are performed by mothers after their newborn has died (fil...

Foraging in seasonal environments can be cognitively challenging. Comparative studies have associated brain size with a frugivorous diet. We investigated how fruit distribution (where) and preference (what) affect foraging decisions in three semi-free ranging primate species with different degrees of frugivory: Macaca tonkeana (Nindiv = 5; Ntrials...

When exploiting the environment, animals have to discriminate, track, and integrate salient spatial cues to navigate and identify goal sites. Actually, they have to know what can be found (e.g. what fruit), where (e.g. on which tree) and when (in what season or moment of the year). This is very relevant for primate species as they often live in sea...

Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the ability to understand others' mental states, endows humans with highly adaptive social skills such as teaching or deceiving. Candidate evolutionary explanations have been proposed for the unique sophistication of human ToM among primates. For example, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis states that the increasin...

This document contains a table summarizing all reported species' group size data as well as the list of all corresponding source references. (DOCX)

This document contains additional details regarding methods (species' feature variables, k-ToM learning model, control task, Bayesian model comparison, phylogenic analyses) and additional results (performance, Volterra analyses, fit accuracy of learning models, confusion analyses for model comparison). (DOCX)

Most experimental paradigms to study visual cognition in humans and non-human species are based on discrimination tasks involving the choice between two or more visual stimuli. To this end, different types of stimuli and procedures for stimuli presentation are used, which highlights the necessity to compare data obtained with different methods. The...

The ability to anticipate how another individual will behave is a critical skill in the animal kingdom. Humans typically deal with this problem using their Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e. the ability to decipher beliefs and intentions of others. Although non-human primates (apes in particular) exhibit elaborate social behavior, there is no established c...

Previous studies have shown that a few bird and primate species successfully use two or more tools sequentially to obtain a goal. Our study incorporated some novel features: we aimed to assess whether captive capuchins (Sapajus spp.; N = 10) are able to sequentially use tools differing in rigidity to obtain a reward. A 90° angled plexiglas tube fil...