Culture also matters for baboons

At the CNRS primatology centre in Rousset, Joël Fagot, a CNRS senior researcher and Nicolas Claidière, also a researcher at the cognitive psychology laboratory in Aix-Marseille, study cultural evolution through social transmission among baboons. To do this, they installed an experimental set-up which the monkey can enter freely and access a computer program offering exercises. Each monkey is identified with a small chip implanted in its arm. The aim is for the two researchers to observe how the progressive accumulation of knowledge in the surveyed baboon population is organized.
This film follows on from "Raisonner par analogie, les babouins aussi" (Baboons also reason by analogy), produced in 2011 by CNRS Images and in which we were already following Joël Fagot's research work.