Social learning strategies in honeybee foragers: do the costs of using private information affect the use of social information?

Animals can acquire information from the environment privately, by sampling it directly, or socially, through learning from others. Generally, private information is more accurate, but expensive to acquire, while social information is cheaper but less reliable. Accordingly, the ‘costly information hypothesis’ predicts that individuals will use private information when the costs associated with doing so are low, but that they should increasingly use social information as the costs of using private information rise. While consistent with considerable data, this theory has yet to be directly tested in a satisfactory manner. We tested this hypothesis by giving minnows ( Phoxinus phoxinus ) a choice between socially demonstrated and non-demonstrated prey patches under conditions of low, indirect and high simulated predation risk. Subjects had no experience (experiment 1) or prior private information that conflicted with the social information provided by the demonstrators (experiment 2). In both experiments, subjects spent more time in the demonstrated patch than in the non-demonstrated patch, and in experiment 1 made fewer switches between patches, when risk was high compared with when it was low. These findings are consistent with the predictions of the costly information hypothesis, and imply that minnows adopt a ‘copy-when-asocial-learning-is-costly’ learning strategy.

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Social information use in adolescents: the impact of adults, peers and household composition

10.31234/osf.io/3tz8u ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Lucas Molleman ◽

Patricia Kanngiesser ◽

Wouter van den Bos

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Social Information ◽

Information Use ◽

Household Composition ◽

Estimation Task ◽

Social Information Use ◽

Simple Estimation ◽

The Impact ◽

Social Learning Strategies

Social learning strategies are key for making adaptive decisions, but their ontogeny remains poorly understood. The authors investigate how social information use depends on its source (adults vs. peer), and how it is shaped by adolescents’ household composition (extended vs. nuclear), a factor known to modulate social development. Using a simple estimation task, we show that social information strongly impacts adolescents’ (N=256) behaviour, especially when its source is an adult. However, social information use does not depend on household composition: the relative impact of adults and peers was similar in adolescents from both household types. Furthermore, adolescents were found to directly copy others’ estimates surprisingly frequently. This study provides novel insights into adolescents’ social information use and contributes to understanding the ontogeny of social learning strategies.

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Beyond existence and aiming outside the laboratory: estimating frequency-dependent and pay-off-biased social learning strategies

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2008.0131 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 363 (1509) ◽

pp. 3515-3528 ◽

Cited By ~ 127

Author(s):

Richard McElreath ◽

Adrian V Bell ◽

Charles Efferson ◽

Mark Lubell ◽

Peter J Richerson ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Social Information ◽

Evolutionary Model ◽

Evolutionary Analysis ◽

Natural Behaviour ◽

Wide Range ◽

Learning Heuristics ◽

The Impact ◽

Social Learning Strategies

The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behaviour, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyse an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organism's fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behaviour, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore, we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting in which the social information itself is endogenous to the experimental group, as it is in natural settings. We develop statistical models for distinguishing among different strategic uses of social information. The experimental data strongly suggest that most participants employ a hierarchical strategy that uses both average observed pay-offs of options as well as frequency information, the same model predicted by our evolutionary analysis to dominate a wide range of conditions.

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Neophobia and social facilitation in narrow-striped mongooses

Animal Cognition ◽

10.1007/s10071-020-01429-5 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Bako N. Rasolofoniaina ◽

Peter M. Kappeler ◽

Claudia Fichtel

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Social Facilitation ◽

Social Information ◽

Group Living ◽

Individual Characteristics ◽

Control Groups ◽

Wild Female ◽

Stimulus Enhancement ◽

Social Learning Strategies

Abstract Social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom, but individuals can differ in how they acquire and use social information. Personality traits, such as neophobia, may, for example, promote individual learning strategies. Here, we contribute comparative data on social learning strategies in carnivorans by examining whether narrow-striped mongooses (Mungotictis decemlineata), a group-living Malagasy euplerid, learn socially and whether neophobia influences social learning. To this end, we tested seven wild female groups with a two-option artificial feeding box, using a demonstrator–observer paradigm, and conducted novel object tests to assess neophobia. In five groups, one individual was trained as a demonstrator displaying one of the techniques, whereas the other two groups served as control groups. Neophobia did not co-vary with an individual’s propensity to seek social information. However, less neophobic individuals, and individuals that tended to seek social information, learned the task faster. Moreover, individuals in demonstrator groups learned the task faster than those in groups without a demonstrator and used the demonstrated technique more often. Hence, narrow-striped mongooses rely on social facilitation and local or stimulus enhancement to solve new problems. Finally, our results suggest that several individual characteristics should be taken into consideration to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of social learning strategies.

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Social Learning

10.23943/princeton/9780691150703.001.0001 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

William Hoppitt ◽

Kevin N. Laland

Keyword(s):

Spatial Distribution ◽

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

Cultural Evolution ◽

Experimental Psychology ◽

Academic Disciplines ◽

Mathematical Methods ◽

Indispensable Tool ◽

Social Learning Strategies

Many animals, including humans, acquire valuable skills and knowledge by copying others. Scientists refer to this as social learning. It is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing areas of behavioral research and sits at the interface of many academic disciplines, including biology, experimental psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience. This book provides a comprehensive, practical guide to the research methods of this important emerging field. It defines the mechanisms thought to underlie social learning and demonstrate how to distinguish them experimentally in the laboratory. It presents techniques for detecting and quantifying social learning in nature, including statistical modeling of the spatial distribution of behavior traits. It also describes the latest theory and empirical findings on social learning strategies, and introduces readers to mathematical methods and models used in the study of cultural evolution. This book is an indispensable tool for researchers and an essential primer for students.

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Strong conformity requires a greater proportion of asocial learning and achieves lower fitness than a payoff-based equivalent

Adaptive Behavior ◽

10.1177/1059712318807127 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 26 (6) ◽

pp. 323-333

Author(s):

Matt Grove

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Theoretical Analysis ◽

Environmental Change ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Learning Strategy ◽

Individual Learning ◽

Heterogeneous Environments ◽

The One ◽

Social Learning Strategies

There is a growing interest in the relative benefits of the different social learning strategies used to transmit information between conspecifics and in the extent to which they require input from asocial learning. Two strategies in particular, conformist and payoff-based social learning, have been subject to considerable theoretical analysis, yet previous models have tended to examine their efficacy in relation to specific parameters or circumstances. This study employs individual-based simulations to derive the optimal proportion of individual learning that coexists with conformist and payoff-based strategies in populations experiencing wide-ranging variation in levels of environmental change, reproductive turnover, learning error and individual learning costs. Results demonstrate that conformity coexists with a greater proportion of asocial learning under all parameter combinations, and that payoff-based social learning is more adaptive in 97.43% of such combinations. These results are discussed in relation to the conjecture that the most successful social learning strategy will be the one that can persist with the lowest frequency of asocial learning, and the possibility that punishment of non-conformists may be required for conformity to confer adaptive benefits over payoff-based strategies in temporally heterogeneous environments.

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Mental time travel, memory and the social learning strategies tournament

Learning and Motivation ◽

10.1016/j.lmot.2012.05.009 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 43 (4) ◽

pp. 241-246 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

L. Fogarty ◽

L. Rendell ◽

K.N. Laland

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Time Travel ◽

Mental Time Travel ◽

The Social ◽

Social Learning Strategies

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Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds

10.1101/326637 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Wataru Toyokawa ◽

Andrew Whalen ◽

Kevin N. Laland

Keyword(s):

Social Learning ◽

Learning Strategies ◽

Group Size ◽

Collective Intelligence ◽

Collective Wisdom ◽

The Social ◽

Challenging Tasks ◽

Task Uncertainty ◽

The Individual ◽

Social Learning Strategies

AbstractWhy groups of individuals sometimes exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ and other times maladaptive ‘herding’ is an enduring conundrum. Here we show that this apparent conflict is regulated by the social learning strategies deployed. We examined the patterns of human social learning through an interactive online experiment with 699 participants, varying both task uncertainty and group size, then used hierarchical Bayesian model-ftting to identify the individual learning strategies exhibited by participants. Challenging tasks elicit greater conformity amongst individuals, with rates of copying increasing with group size, leading to high probabilities of herding amongst large groups confronted with uncertainty. Conversely, the reduced social learning of small groups, and the greater probability that social information would be accurate for less-challenging tasks, generated ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effects in other circumstances. Our model-based approach provides evidence that the likelihood of collective intelligence versus herding can be predicted, resolving a longstanding puzzle in the literature.

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