The Playful Brain by Sergio Pellis & Vivien Pellis

Author:Sergio Pellis & Vivien Pellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1 A mother bonobo is shown lying on her back and using her feet to hold her infant overhead. From this position, the mother can jostle and shake the infant, providing it with visual, tactile and vestibular stimulation. (Adapted from a photograph by Frans Lanting. © 2008, Frans Lanting/www.lanting.com)

In our model, mother–infant play in primates provides an additional layer to the complexity of the behavior of typical, mammalian mother–infant interactions. Such mother–infant primate play may have, at first, been limited to more gentle versions of the species-typical play fighting seen in peer–peer interactions. In some lineages, however, this play may have been enhanced by incorporating forms of playful interaction that bear little to no resemblance to the species-typical pattern of play fighting as described above for great ape mothers. If we are correct, then it is apparent what infants gain from this early play, but what are the origins of this behavior in mothers?

It is likely that primates began as nocturnal, solitary living, arboreal animals. Some primates alive today have maintained this lifestyle: the lorises and pottos of Asia and Africa.35 Unlike rodents and many other small nocturnal mammals, lorises, like other primates, give birth to one, or occasionally two, babies, at a time. A free-living loris mother “parks” her baby in some safe location when she goes off to forage, and then returns to the baby to tend to its needs. The infant, therefore, has little to no opportunity to encounter other infants. This means that, if play fighting is a necessary part of growing up, then it either has to be the mother with whom they play, or nothing. Thus, the peer-deprived youngster, if it were to have any experience of play, would have to direct playful overtures to its mother. But why should she respond? At a functional level, her playful counter-response makes sense because by doing so, she would provide her offspring with essential, developmental experiences, and this would enhance her offspring’s chances of success in surviving and later reproducing. This does not, however, explain the mechanisms that propel her to play with her infant in the first place.

Adult–adult play fighting is quite common in primates and one context in which it is frequently used is in courtship behavior. The use of play fighting in courtship is particularly prevalent in primates whose social systems lead to infrequent or sporadic encounters with members of the opposite sex – that is, sex that occurs between unfamiliar animals (see chapter 5). You can see the direction in which this argument is going. The lorises and their kin have social systems that make adult–adult contact infrequent, and yes, they have well-developed and frequent adult–adult play fighting. Indeed, the adults are so playful in some species that they play more with other adults than they do with youngsters.36 If these mothers already have a propensity for play, then that propensity may have aided them in responding to the playful overtures of their young. In this fashion, primates representing an early

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