iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Can I speak German now? No! But can I read the packaging of items in the supermarket? Sort of!

Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Increasing studies are documenting a behaviour called peering: close range, sustained observation of social partners. Peering is often discussed in relation to observational social learning in wild primates. But how can we actually know if (and what) animals learn from each other during peering?

Figure 1. Examples of peering in foraging contexts across different primate species. Examples of peering at foraging using tools: (a) West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus; photo: T. Matsuzawa). An immature female (left) and an immature male (right) peer at their mother (center) cracking oil-palm nuts (Elaeis guineensis) using stone tools during a long-term naturalistic field experiment at Bossou, Guinea. (b) Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii; photo: G. Duvot). An immature orangutan peers at their mother performing extractive foraging using a stick tool. Examples of peering at foraging without tools: (c) Bonobos (Pan paniscus; photo: B. Fruth). (d) Chacma baboons (Papio ursinus; photo: E. Fernàndez-Fueyo). (e) Vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus; photo: L. Schad). (f) Panamanian white faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus imitator; photo: B Barrett).

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

A delayed personal update, but two months ago I got married! ✨ No new scientific insights, but who needs 'em! (Also please know my husband is a lawyer and I will be using that as a threat from now on!) 😌

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

We show that cultural transmission is essential for orangs to learn basic subsistence information in the wild. The repertoire of cultural information possessed by apes is likely to be far more expansive than social customs and highly technical skills, including simple info about 'what to eat'.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Even when orangutans were presented with over 148,000 opportunities to interact with different food items over long-term development, orangs only developed adult-like diets (at least 90% adult repertoire) by adulthood if they also engaged in social learning.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Every single parameter of our ABM was estimated from wild data. When simulated orangs could engage in forms of social learning seen in the wild, the timings of diet development matched those observed in wild individuals (validating that our ABM captured wild orangs' learning from real-world inputs).

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Leveraging over a decade of behavioral data collected in the wild, we constructed an agent-based simulation (ABM) of orangutan diet development between birth and adulthood (~15 years), focusing on individual exploration + social influences on exploration, e.g. exposure, enhancement and peering.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

To answer these questions, we investigated whether social learning has important, long-term effects on the rate and outcomes of diet development in wild Sumatran orangutans. Moreover, we circumvent these methodological difficulties through running biologically relevant experiments ‘in-sillico’.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

Whilst many animal species exhibit the capacity to socially learn, it is unclear whether animals’ social learning similarly leads to the development of knowledge repertoires which are broader than animals could construct individually.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Many thanks to all researchers and field assistants involved with data collection over the years at Bossou, and in curating the Bossou video archive. (📸 credit T Matsuzawa).

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Further research is required to precisely characterize how these structural features of chimpanzee actions are generated, including further categorizing the predictable 'chunks' of actions chimpanzees use in tool-use sequence. (Photo Credit: TMatsuzawa)

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Half of adults produced NADs at distances which could not be reproduced by non-hierarchical, null models. MI decay dynamics often reflected those predicted by 'composite' hierarchical action organization, providing objective support for the organization of actions through hierarchical 'chunks'.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

We collected data from chimpanzees at Bossou cracking nuts using stone tools (>8000 actions, cracking > 300 individual nuts). We used this data to run statistical models which can objectively identify signatures of NADs and possible hierarchical organization ('chunking'). (Photo Credit: T.Matsuzawa)

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Tool-use behaviours have previously been hypothesized to involve hierarchical organization, but it has been hard to evidence this objectively (humans are biased to infer 'chunks'). This may also suggest that these behaviours could contain NADs, though never investigated. (Photo Credit: D.Biro)

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We used video footage of wild chimpanzees at Bossou cracking nuts (>1600 nuts) across a 17 year period, to quantify whether aging influences tool use. We found reductions in engagement with aging, and also for some individuals, reductions in efficiency.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We studied how aging influences a naturally-occurring tool-use behavior of wild west-African chimpanzees (nut cracking). Tool use draws on many physical & cognitive traits which can senesce in captive primates (see manuscript); yet, senescence of tool use has never been studied.

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Elliot Howard-Spink @ehowaspi.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Given their close phylogenetic relationship with humans, apes are extremely useful models for understanding the human aging process. Yet, given their long lives, it is challenging to observe how aging influences individuals over time...

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