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Being able to pick up social cues can be considered an extremely important skill. Since social cues are mostly representative of a particular culture or tradition, when a person travels to unknown regions, he or she finds ways to adapt to the particular customs of that area. Based on a new research study, humans might not be the only ones that acknowledge the differences between two communities and pick up on social cues. The findings presented by lead researcher, Erica van de Waal, a researcher from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and colleagues discovered that wild Vervet monkeys could also change their behaviors based on social cues.

The researchers observed the eating habits of the wild Vervet monkeys that live in the regions of a South African reserve. They wanted to train the monkeys into eating only certain specific colors of corn that they had dyed previously. The researchers placed pink and blue corns next to one another in small containers for a total of four groups of wild monkeys resulting in four sets of corn. The scientists soaked two sets of the pink corn in aloe to create a bitter taste and the other two sets of blue corn in aloe. The researchers observed that monkeys in all groups started to only consume the corn that was not bitter.

In order to test whether or not monkeys would learn from each other and adapt social cues, the scientists stopped treating the corn with aloe. They found that monkeys continued to eat the color that was never treated for aloe. Newborn monkeys and dominant monkeys in particular never tried the color of corn that was soaked in aloe. The scientists also found that male monkeys that were not local monkeys also only ate the local color of the region. These monkeys appeared to have adapted to the local areas and learned to only consume the liked colored corn.

"Culture was thought to be something only humans had. But if you define culture as socially transmitted knowledge, skills and information, it turns out we see some of that in animals. Now this experiment comes along and I must say it really blew me away," said Carel van Schaik, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich. Schaik was not involved in the study. "Imagine you've just learned to eat pink corn and for a while blue corn was really bad, but then you move to an area where it's the opposite and basically you wipe your slate clean. You think, 'Oh, these locals, they must know what's the best thing.' "

The study was published in the journal, Science.