Title: Predator avoidance by wild bonnet macaques: The roles of classical conditioning and innate cognitive processes. 

Richard G. Coss, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of California, Davis. 

Wild bonnets macaques (Macaca radiata) living in urban and forest settings react to conspecific alarm calls by running up trees to seek refuge.   The alarm calls of neighboring species, such as langurs and sambar deer, are also provocative to these monkeys, but only among troops that hear these alarm calls  routinely in the forest.  Juvenile monkeys treat interspecific alarm calls as signifying danger, indicating that the time frame for learning occurs during infant development.  A Pavlovian process of associative learning is proposed to explain how bonnet macaques in the forest learn the alarm calls of neighboring species.  Although alarm calls provide information about the potential presence of a predator, bonnet macaques rely on vision to detect stealthy predators, such a pythons and leopards, partly occluded by vegetation.  Experience is not a prerequisite for leopard recognition and juveniles are more excited by snakes than are adults, suggesting that long-term experience attenuates the reactivity to snakes.  Unlike snakes, leopards are provocative to both juveniles and adults.  Experimental evidence will be presented showing that the felid configuration and the spotted yellow coat are essential leopard-recognition cues, possibly because these cues have been available historically as contextual sources for natural selection. Similar processes of natural selection might explain the high reactivity of other primates to leopards.  Together, these examples provide a backdrop for evaluating how early learning and evolved cognitive systems promote survival in a dangerous world.