Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Joshua Plotnik

Committee Members

David Lahti

Martin Chodorow

Anna Wilkinson

Subject Categories

Animal Studies | Cognitive Psychology | Comparative Psychology

Keywords

Cooperation, Kin recognition, Cognitive mechanisms

Abstract

The capacity for solitary species to cope with sociocognitive challenges has been understudied due to the assumption that solitary living precludes the emergence of cognitive mechanisms able to address challenges in a social domain. However, even solitary species experience social challenges such as decisions about mate choice or other associations. These decisions are predicated on how a species discriminates between individuals and flexibly responds to conspecific behaviors. To determine whether the cognitive mechanisms used by social species in social contexts are qualitatively unique and specialized, solitary species must be tested in the same tasks as well to make direct comparisons. This dissertation seeks to describe the cognitive mechanisms available to giant pandas, a solitary carnivore, in social environments. Giant pandas are socially housed in captivity, which may affect their preexisting social behaviors and predispose them to attend to social information more readily than wild populations. In chapter 1, I assess the kin recognition mechanisms employed by giant pandas when investigating conspecific urine deposits. I offer them a dichotomous choice between two urine deposits, one from a related conspecific and one from an unrelated conspecific, which varied in familiarity across four conditions. Prior to this study, it was unknown whether giant pandas rely on information regarding prior association or on genetic relatedness to make investigative discriminations. I found that giant pandas rely on prior associations, as evidenced by the subjects spending significantly more time investigating unfamiliar odors than familiar ones. Genetic relatedness did not predict how long giant pandas spent investigating a conspecific’s urine deposit. This suggests that giant pandas may erroneously interpret unrelated conspecifics as kin if they have significant exposure prior to sexual maturity. However, it is worth noting that in trials where familiarity was held constant across the two deposits, a significant preference for the genetically unrelated individual emerged when both deposits were unfamiliar. This suggests there may be a latent or yet-to-be-described capacity to perceive and respond to genetic-relatedness information. In chapter 2, I exposed the giant pandas to a cooperative problem-solving task to assess whether giant pandas were capable of flexibly modifying their behavior in response to both a conspecific and heterospecific (human) social partner’s actions. I employed the string-pull paradigm, in which a rope was threaded through a table so that the two ends had to be pulled in tandem by two individuals to bring a food reward within reach. While they were significantly less successful with a social partner than when using a modified version of the table alone, they did visually attend to the social partner. This behavior was significantly more frequent upon failure when paired with another panda, and consistently frequent when paired with a human partner. They were also more successful with a human partner compared to a panda partner. These results suggest that giant pandas understand the importance of the social partner in the task, although they struggle to use this information to make advantageous behavioral responses. Overall, these results suggest flexibility in response to social information, typically unexpected in a solitary carnivore, and have implications for our understanding of how cognitive mechanisms change in response to a species' needs.

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