Caring for the Dead: Emotional and Social Responses to Infant Death in Wild Capuchins [Conference Presentation Abstract]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding nonhuman primates' responses to death offers insights into the evolutionary origins of grief and attachment.While death perception remains poorly understood in animals, evidence shows that some species display consistent behavioral patterns following the loss of conspecifics.Among nonhuman primates, the most common behaviors related to the death of a group member include carrying and taking care of the deceased individual.Here, we describe and quantify a likely case of infanticide in a wild group of Sapajus xanthosternos (a critically endangered capuchin species), followed by the prolonged carrying and caretaking of the deceased infant by a primiparous mother.The mother maintained physical contact with the corpse for 90% of the observation period and exhibited grooming and protective behaviors despite her visible locomotion impairments.Other group members, especially adult females and juveniles, showed interest in the corpse, suggesting a broader social awareness of death within the group.By comparing this case with reports in capuchins, we explore whether these behaviors (1) reflect disrupted affective bonds, (2) indicate a delayed recognition of irreversible state change, or (3) serve communicative or social functions.This represents the first documented thanatological response in S. xanthosternos, advancing comparative thanatology by demonstrating grief-like behaviors in a neotropical primate.The gradual behavioral shift observed-from intensive care to eventual abandonment-may indicate a form of cognitive and emotional processing akin to mourning.These findings illustrate the value of naturalistic observation in understanding the evolutionary roots of emotion, attachment, and social cognition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".