Description
Social play has been shown to facilitate the formation and development of social relationships between individuals. Social play may also involve objects. Most research on object play behavior suggests that it is explorative in nature and adaptive in gaining foraging skills. However, not much is known about how individuals may use objects to initiate social interactions with others. Captive ravens have been shown to engage in interactions over cached objects, thereby learning about others’ behaviors. Here we present two studies on object-handling behavior in a group of individually marked, free-flying non-breeder ravens. Firstly, we explore the patterns and contexts in which this behaviour occurs using our long-term data set. As expected, we find that the frequency of object play decreases with age, yet we also observe it among adults. Further, we see effects of sex and season. These findings support various functions of object play like exploration, learning about others’ behavior and development of social relationships. Focusing on the latter in the second study, we test the hypothesis that ravens may engage in object play to attract the attention of and initiate interactions with other ravens. To examine our hypothesis, we collected ~200 focal observations since October 2021 on the object-handling behavior in our study population. Our preliminary analysis shows a trend that object-handling behavior elicits approaches from other ravens and, indeed, may lead to social interactions. In addition, we also look at the effect of early life social environment among a subsample of the ravens that were raised in captivity in small or large families. The potential implications of these results and further steps in the analysis will be discussed.| Period | 14 Aug 2023 → 20 Aug 2023 |
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| Event title | Behaviour 2023 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Bielefeld, Germany, North Rhine-WestphaliaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |