New mother rats, under the influence ofparturitional hormones, are nurturant as soon as their pups are born. Maternal experiences acquired under the influence ofthese hormones are retained for a considerable period beyond parturition. This effect is more robust in the postpartum animal than in a nulliparous animal that has been induced to become maternal nonhormonally through daily exposure to pups. The present experiments were designed to determine whether the parity difference in robustness of a maternal experience reflects a parity difference in the ease of acquiring any task, or whether the learning must be specific to pups and the maternal context. In the first experiment, primiparous and nulliparous female rats were compared in their performance on a socially conditioned food preference task. Each animal was exposed to a conspecific that had previously eaten a new food and was then tested for amount consumed of the preexposed as opposed to nonpreexposed new food. The animals were exposed to their conspecifics for 5, 15, or 30 min and were tested 7 days later. Both parity groups and all three exposure groups exhibited a significant preference for the preexposed diet, but a higher proportion of the postpartum animals did so. In the second experiment, postpartum and nulliparous animals were compared in their ability to recognize juvenile animals to whom they had been preexposed. Exposures lasted 30 min and exposure test intervals were 1,3, or 5 days. Again, although both groups recognized the juveniles, the postpartum group showed a stronger recognition effect (reflected in change in investigation scores from exposure to reexposure). Thus, although the effects found were small, both experiments indicate that parity influences the robustness of social learning in a direction favoring the postpartum animal.