1 Inferences about food location in three cercopithecine species: an insight 2 into the socioecological cognition of primates. 1,2,* 1,2 1,2 3 Odile PETIT , Valérie DUFOUR Marie HERRENSCHMIDT , Arianna DE 3,4 5,6 7 4 MARCO , Elisabeth H. M. STERCK & Josep CALL 5 1Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Département Ecologie, Physiologie et 6 Ethologie, Strasbourg, France 7 2Université de Strasbourg, Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien, Strasbourg, France 8 3Parco Faunistico di Piano dell’Abatino, San Lorenzo, Italy 9 4Fondazione Ethoikos, Radicondoli, Italy 10 5Animal Ecology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands 11 6Ethology Research, Biomedical Primate Research Centre, Rijswijk, the Netherlands 12 7Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 *Corresponding author: 21 Odile PETIT 22
[email protected] 23 Telephone number: 00 33 3 88 10 74 57 24 Fax number: 00 33 3 88 10 69 06 1 25 Abstract 26 Many animal species use a variety of cognitive strategies to locate food resources. One 27 strategy is to make inferences by exclusion, i.e. perceiving the absence of reward as a cue that 28 another location should be investigated. The use of such advanced cognitive strategies may be 29 more prominent in species that are known to frequently solve social challenges, and 30 inferential reasoning has mainly been investigated in social species such as corvids, dogs, 31 dolphins and non-human primates. In this paper we investigate how far social intricacy may 32 explain the disparity of reasoning performances observed in three cercopithecine species that 33 differ in the density of their social network and the diversity of their social partners.