Capuchins Bond Through Imitative Behavior

Anthropologists have for a long time suspected that behavioral mimicking is a type of behavior that appeared in humans in order to facilitate the formation of bonds and friendships between total strangers. This conclusion was reached after studies indicated that certain people tend to imitate the body postures or mannerisms of people they've just met, without either of them realizing this. This behavior, which essentially promotes empathy and affection, was recently discovered in capuchin monkeys as well.

“Researchers have known that human beings prefer the behavior of other people who subtly imitate their gestures and other affects. Observing how imitation promotes bonding in primates may lead to insights in disorders in which imitation and bonding is impaired, such as certain forms of autism,” says the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) director Duane Alexander, M.D. This was the place where the National Institutes of Health (NIH) portion of the study was conducted. Two Italian research institutions also participated in the investigation.

“It has been argued that the link between behavior matching and increases in affiliation might have played an important role in human evolution by helping to maintain harmonious relationships between individuals. We propose that the same principle also holds for other group-living primates,” the authors write in a new scientific study, which appears in the August 14the issue of the journal Science. The research was led by Annika Paukner and Stephen J. Suomi of the NICHD, Elisabetta Visalberghi of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, at the National Research Council, in Rome, and Pier F. Ferrari from the University of Parma.

In the experiments, a three-room cage was constructed. At each end, on the outside, there was a researcher, while a monkey could roam the three rooms freely. Each of them was given a ball. The capuchins then engaged in various activities with the ball, and one of the researchers imitated them, while the other did something else. The capuchin was proven to be more attracted to the investigator repeating its actions, and always moved to the room closer to them. The experts say that this proves a strong affiliation forms between the primate and its imitator, which may favor interaction.

“I believe the link between imitation and affiliation might be a very basic mechanism, and might well be shared with many other primates, perhaps even with other (non-primate) animals that live in complex social groups. We would of course need to determine how common it is in the animal kingdom,” Paukner tells LiveScience.