Behavioural flexibility and its drivers in semi-urban vervet monkeys

Abstract Phylogenetic comparisons suggest that behavioural flexibility facilitates success in urban environments. It remains less clear whether urbanization fosters cognitive skills that require flexibility, or whether successful individuals in urban environments simply apply pre-evolved skills to solve new problems. To investigate whether variation in anthropogenic experience drives behavioural flexibility required to solve a new technical problem, we presented 42 semi-urban vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) with a three-phase foraging experiment. For this, we measured each monkey’s tendency to “raid” human structures in their search for food to assess whether their anthropogenic experience explained individual variation in flexibility and problem-solving skills. We then used a probabilistic model to describe the series of monkeys’ actions when attempting to solve the foraging experiment. This allowed us to quantify three traits encompassing individuals’ behavioural flexibility: switch tendency between solutions, innovativeness, and learning sensitivity. We found that individuals’ switch tendency and innovativeness were not explained by anthropogenic experience and that the three traits were unrelated to each other. Moreover, neither switch tendency, nor innovativeness predicted the monkeys’ human food consumption in this habitat. Thus, our study suggests that behavioural flexibility is not driven by anthropogenic foraging experience. Contrasting with the hypothesis that urbanization selects for behavioural flexibility, our findings instead imply that vervet monkeys already had the sufficient behavioural flexibility and cognitive capacities to successfully exploit the urban habitat. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.