DEVELOPMENT OF GOLDEN LION TAMARIN FORAGING BEHAVIOR

我们对食物和饮食的许多态度都是在童年时期形成的。因此，儿童及其后成人的健康和营养状况是由童年喂养经历决定的。然而，我们对食物偏好、饮食习惯和技能是如何习得的理解仍然非常初级。我们确实知道，人类婴儿在很大程度上比任何其他哺乳动物都更依赖社会手段来获取与食物有关的信息。狨猴和绢毛猴在非人类灵长类动物中是独一无二的，因为它们的家庭成员提供断奶的幼崽，就像我们人类提供自己的幼崽一样。本研究拟以金狮绢毛猴为模型，研究人类食物选择和饮食习惯的发展。它将侧重于在绢毛猴生命的第一年里，独立试错学习和对食物的社会学习之间的相互作用。野外观察和收集由年长群体成员给予未成熟的绢毛猴食物类型的营养分析将用于检查供应功能，描述幼崽获取食物的各种手段以及这些食物获取策略在个体发育过程中如何变化，并描述看护人在决定幼崽食物摄入量方面的作用。行为实验旨在衡量食物熟悉度对食物迁移相互作用的影响，并将在圈养家庭群体中进行，以进一步研究供应的功能。为了更清楚地评估幼崽乞讨食物的成本，还将在圈养的群体中进行幼崽乞讨叫声的回放实验。因此，野生动物行为的自然变异和受控制的实验变异将被用来检验有关食物选择和觅食技能发展的假设。

Many of our attitudes about food and eating are developed during childhood. Thus, the health and nutritional condition of the child, and of the subsequent adult, are shaped by childhood feeding experiences. However, our understanding of how food preferences, eating habits and skills are learned is still very rudimentary. We do know that human infants rely, to a much greater extent than perhaps any other mammal, on social means to acquire food-related information. The marmosets and tamarins are unique among non-human primates in the degree to which family members provision weaned young, much as we humans provision our young. This study proposes to use the golden lion tamarin as a model for the study of the development of food selection and eating habits in humans. It will focus on the interplay between independent trial and error learning and social learning about food during the tamarins' first year of life. Field observations and collection for nutritional analysis of food types given to immature tamarins by older group members will be used to examine the functions of provisioning, to describe the various means by which young acquire food and how these food acquisition strategies change during ontogeny, and to describe the roles of caretakers in determining food intake by the young. Behavioral experiments designed to measure the effects of food familiarity on food transfer interactions will be conducted on captive family groups to further examine the functions of provisioning. Playback experiments of infant begging calls also will be conducted on groups in captivity in order to more clearly assess the costs of begging for food by the young. Thus, natural variation in the behavior of wild animals and controlled experimental variation will be used to test hypotheses regarding the development of food selection and foraging skills.