Maintaining the balance between costs and benefits is challenging for species living in complex and dynamic socio-ecological environments, such as primates, but also crucial for shaping life history, reproductive and feeding strategies. Indeed, individuals must decide to invest time and energy to obtain food, services and partners, with little direct feedback on the success of their investments. Whereas decision-making relies heavily upon cognition in humans, the extent to which it also involves cognition in other species, based on their environmental constraints, has remained a challenging question. Building mental representations relating behaviours and their long-term outcome could be critical for other primates, but there are actually very little data relating cognition to real socio-ecological challenges in extant and extinct primates. Here, we review available data illustrating how specific cognitive processes enable(d) modern primates and extinct hominins to manage multiple resources (e.g. food, partners) and to organize their behaviour in space and time, both at the individual and at the group level. We particularly focus on how they overcome fluctuating and competing demands, and select courses of action corresponding to the best possible packages of potential costs and benefits in reproductive and foraging contexts.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Existence and prevalence of economic behaviours among non-human primates’.

对于生活在复杂和动态社会生态环境中的物种（例如灵长类动物）来说，维持成本和收益之间的平衡是一项挑战，但对于塑造生活史、繁殖和喂养策略也至关重要。事实上，个人必须决定投入时间和精力来获得食物、服务和合作伙伴，而他们的投资成功与否几乎没有直接的反馈。尽管决策在很大程度上依赖于人类的认知，但基于环境限制，决策在多大程度上也涉及其他物种的认知，这仍然是一个具有挑战性的问题。建立与行为及其长期结果相关的心理表征可能对其他灵长类动物至关重要，但实际上很少有数据将认知与现存和灭绝的灵长类动物的真实社会生态挑战相关联。这里，我们回顾了现有的数据，这些数据说明了特定的认知过程如何使（d）现代灵长类动物和已灭绝的人类能够管理多种资源（例如食物、伙伴）并在个人和群体层面组织他们在空间和时间上的行为。我们特别关注它们如何克服波动和竞争的需求，并选择与繁殖和觅食环境中潜在成本和收益的最佳可能方案相对应的行动方案。

本文是主题“非人类灵长类动物经济行为的存在和流行”的一部分。