Book ChapterDOI
Chapter 3 Social Processes Influencing Learning in Animals: A Review of the Evidence
William Hoppitt,Kevin N. Laland +1 more
TLDR
This chapter discusses the social processes, influencing learning in animals, which can result in the social transmission of information through a population, resulting in homogeneity of behavior that extends beyond the period of interaction.Abstract:
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the social processes, influencing learning in animals. Social learning can result in the social transmission of information through a population, resulting in homogeneity of behavior that extends beyond the period of interaction. Examples include: the spread of foraging skills or vocalizations through vertebrate populations. A classification of social learning processes is presented. Imitation is among the most contentious of social learning processes. Observational conditioning involves the formation of an S–S association, whereas contextual imitation involves the formation of an S–R association between the contextual stimulus and the observed response. If an observer could learn R–S contingencies through observation, it could potentially learn what not to do in a specific context, as a result of watching other animals make mistakes. Observational R–S learning could be combined with production imitation to ensure that an observer disproportionately acquires novel action sequences that it sees being rewarded. The evidence needed to isolate each of the social learning processes is also discussed in the chapter.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament
Luke Rendell,Robert Boyd,Daniel Cownden,Magnus Enquist,Kimmo Eriksson,Kimmo Eriksson,Marcus W. Feldman,Laurel Fogarty,Stefano Ghirlanda,Stefano Ghirlanda,Timothy P. Lillicrap,Kevin N. Laland +11 more
TL;DR: A computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (for example, trial-and-error learning) to acquire adaptive behavior in a complex environment found strategies that relied heavily on social learning were found to be remarkably successful, even when asocial information was no more costly than social information.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cognitive culture: theoretical and empirical insights into social learning strategies
Luke Rendell,Laurel Fogarty,William Hoppitt,Thomas J. H. Morgan,Mike M. Webster,Kevin N. Laland +5 more
TL;DR: Research into social learning (learning from others) has expanded significantly in recent years, not least because of productive interactions between theoretical and empirical approaches, which places social learning within a cognitive decision-making framework.
Journal ArticleDOI
What's social about social learning?
TL;DR: It is argued that social and asocial learning depend on the same basic learning mechanisms; these are adapted for the detection of predictive relationships in all natural domains; and they are associative mechanisms--processes that encode information for long-term storage by forging excitatory and inhibitory links between event representations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social networks predict patch discovery in a wild population of songbirds
TL;DR: The utility of social network analysis as a method to investigate social information use is demonstrated and it is suggested that the greater probability of receiving social information about new foraging patches confers a benefit on more socially connected individuals.
BookDOI
Sociality: The Behaviour of Group-Living Animals
TL;DR: In Animal Social Behaviour as discussed by the authors, the authors integrate the most up-to-date empirical and theoretical research to provide a new synthesis of the field, which is aimed at fellow researchers and postgraduate students on the topic.
References
More filters
Book
Handbook of perception and human performance
TL;DR: This handbook covers theory and methods; basic visual processes; auditory, kinesthetic, cutaneous, and vestibular senses; and space and motion perception; and human performance.
Book
The dance language and orientation of bees
TL;DR: The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees as discussed by the authors is a seminal work in the field of honeybee behavior that describes in non-technical language what he discovered in a lifetime of study about honeybees - their methods of orientation, their sensory faculties, and their remarkable ability to communicate with one another.
Book
Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations
TL;DR: The study of bird song focuses on how song develops, sexual selection and female choice, and themes and variations in time and space.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social Facilitation: A solution is suggested for an old unresolved social psychological problem.
Journal ArticleDOI
Arms races between and within species.
Richard Dawkins,John R. Krebs +1 more
TL;DR: The arms race concept is suggested to help to resolve three long-standing questions in evolutionary theory: one lineage may drive the other to extinction, one may reach an optimum, thereby preventing the other from doing so, and both sides may reach a mutual local optimum.