Stories of lemurs and robots - Narrative Intelligence - page 74

to understand the social relationships of others, i.e. their third-party rela-
tionships . Such relationships need to be recognized and memorized. Indi-
viduals need to be able to manipulate information about a set of relation-
ships, e.g. for the purpose of forming alliances or tactical deception.
Kinship (based on certain patterns of association rather than on genetics),
friendship (based on relatively recent aggressive or affiliative encounters) and
dominance rank are all involved in the most important kinds of relationships
recognized by primates. Many other avian and mammalian species are able to
recognize individual group mates, remember past interactions with them, and
predict their behavior, but it is not clearly established whether and/or to what
extent they understand third-party relationships, i.e. relationships that group
members have with one another. Enculturated animals (e.g. chimpanzees that
grow up in a human family, but also pet animals such as dogs and cats) of-
ten show quite human-like social tactics (e.g. deception, cf. (Byrne 1997)),
and they can even show cognitive skills different from their mother-reared
cousins (e.g. improvement of imitative skills in enculturated chimpanzees, cf.
(Tomasello et al. 1993)). It is at present therefore difficult to compare pri-
mate social intelligence with social intelligence in non-primate mammals. For
more information on the primate social field see (Tomasello & Call 1997),
(Dunbar 1998).
In terms of social complexity (and cognitive processes needed to deal with
it), the world of an animal which takes into account third party actions is more
complex than the world of an animal which only interacts dyadically. The social
problems are still greater if an animal takes into account the probable thoughts
as well as actions of its partners in interaction (Byrne & Whiten 1997).
The social life of Lemur catta
Here is an example of the social life of a non-human primate. The primate
Center at Duke University gives the following information on Lemur catta ,see
Figure 1, a prosimian primate unique to Madagascar:
“Ring-tailed lemurs are found in social groups of 3-25 individuals. Females
remain in the group to which they were born for their entire lives, while males
may change groups when they reach sexual maturity. Ringtail groups range
over a considerable area each day in search of food. All group members use this
common home range, and groups are often aggressive towards other groups
at the borders of these areas. Females are usually dominant to males, which
gives them preferential access to food and the choice of whom to mate with.