Does playful inventiveness lead to adaptability?

We will design an experiment testing the importance of inventions for adaptability and assessing their potential role in evolution. Inventiveness is the faculty by which animals can produce new, i.e., unpredictable, behaviour given their behavioural repertoire, and that of their group. Through the use of this faculty, animals are truly agents of their actions: they bring something new into the world, not predetermined either by their genetics or by the environment. But to appreciate the evolutionary significance of this agency, to assess the extent to which animals can be agents of evolution, it is necessary to examine how this inventiveness is connected to adaptability. In theory, the ability to generate new behaviours should allow organisms to respond adaptively to new situations. But is inventiveness really the key skill involved in adaptability?

The experiment will proceed in two parts.

• Step 1: A group of baboons will be presented with a new object that can be used in play (a “toy”). We will observe how they interact with the toy and identify which of these behaviours are playful (and not just exploratory), and which of these behaviours are inventive, i.e., original uses of the toy. Using these data, we will identify the characteristics of more inventive individuals (e.g., age, sex, rank). The toy will be presented multiple times to avoid neophobia in the next step.

• Step 2: We will present a foraging task to the group of baboons. To get to the reward from the task, the baboons will need to use the object that we have previously presented to them as a toy. We will record whether there is a correlation between the inventiveness shown in play and solving the task. More specifically, we will ask whether those who played inventively with the object most succeed in the task. If so, were the inventions reused in their identical patterns (i.e., the inventors would have invented new behaviours in play that could be reused identically in a functional context)? Or did the inventors exhibit a new behavioural pattern during the task? This latter situation suggests that, while playing, baboons gain familiarity with and knowledge of the object that can be useful in a functional context.

Two outcomes are possible:
- If there is no correlation between inventiveness during play and solving a foraging task, the idea that play prepares for the unexpected (Spinka et al. 2001) and develops behavioural flexibility in a way that can have an impact on adaptability should be revised. This would highlight that there is a difference between inventiveness in play and the inventiveness needed to solve directly functional problems.
- If there is a correlation, we will further investigate whether the solvers take up the structure of the behaviour invented in play or whether they propose a new behaviour. Is the inventiveness of play a kind of behavioural flexibility that the play can train, or does it produce new behaviours, which can be taken up identically?