Data from: The effects of tradition on problem solving by two wild populations of bearded capuchin monkeys in a probing task

The effects of culture on individual cognition have become a core issue
among cultural primatologists. Field studies with wild populations provide
evidence on the role of social cues in the ontogeny of tool use in
non-human primates, and on the transmission of such behaviours over
generations through socially biased learning. Recent experimental studies
have shown that cultural knowledge may influence problem solving in wild
populations of chimpanzees. Here, we present the results from a field
experiment comparing the performance of bearded capuchin monkeys (Sapajus
libidinosus) from two wild savannah populations with distinct toolkits in
a probing task. Only the population that already exhibited the customary
use of probing tools succeeded in solving the new problem, suggesting that
their cultural repertoire shaped their approach to the new task. Moreover,
only this population, which uses stone tools in a broader range of
contexts, tried to use them to solve the problem. Social interactions can
affect the formation of learning sets and they affect the performance of
the monkeys in problem solving. We suggest that behavioural traditions
affect the ways non-human primates solve novel foraging problems using
tools.