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 has 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 nonhuman 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 which 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 it affects the performance of the monkeys on problem solving. We suggest that behavioural traditions affect the ways nonhuman primates solve novel foraging problems using tools.