The Role of Exploration and Exploitation in Primate Communication

The concepts of social learning and exploration have been central to debates in comparative cognition research. While their roles in the origins of human cumulative culture on the one hand and creativity on the other have been highlighted, the two concepts have mostly been studied separately. In this article, we examine the relationship between adopting similar or different behaviours within a group, focusing on how exploration and exploitation shape primate communication systems. Using a comparative approach, we discuss how similarity and differentiation of communicative behaviour can be viewed as two endpoints on a continuum, impacting both individual- and group-level behavioural variation. While group-level variation is evident in some ape behaviours (e.g. foraging traditions), individual variation in communicative behaviour appears to outweigh group-level differences, making a widespread communicative culture in apes unlikely. Drawing parallels to language acquisition in human infants, we propose that ape communication follows an exploration-exploitation trajectory, with initial exploration gradually giving way to focused exploitation of genetically predisposed and/or individually developed communicative repertoires. By integrating the individual and social learning processes underlying communicative behaviour, we can gain a deeper understanding of how exploration-exploitation tensions shape communication systems across species.