Three experiments examined the conditions under which the spatial choices of rats searching for food are influenced by the choices made by other rats. Model rats learned a consistent set of baited locations in a 5 × 5 matrix of locations, some of which contained food. In Experiment 1, subject rats could determine the baited locations after choosing 1 location because all of the baited locations were on the same side of the matrix during each trial (the baited side varied over trials). Under these conditions, the social cues provided by the model rats had little or no effect on the choices made by the subject rats. The lack of social influence on choices occurred despite a simultaneous social influence on rats' location in the testing arena (Experiment 2). When the outcome of the subject rats' own choices provided no information about the positions of other baited locations, on the other hand, social cues strongly controlled spatial choices (Experiment 3). These results indicate that social information about the location of food influences spatial choices only when those cues provide valid information that is not redundant with the information provided by other cues. This suggests that social information is learned about, processed, and controls behavior via the same mechanisms as other kinds of stimuli.

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A computerized task could be completed by predicting the location of a moving target or by choosing several stationary targets. In a fitness-relevant condition, this task was presented to participants in terms of hunting and gathering food necessary for survival. In four experiments, there was no evidence that male and female participants differed in terms of their tendency to complete the task in these two ways. In three of the experiments, performance in the fitness-relevant condition was compared to performance in a control condition in which the task was presented as a computer game with no reference to hunting or gathering. No evidence for an effect of fitness relevance was found. These results challenge the idea that sex differences in spatial cognition are related to the sexual differentiation of foraging behavior during human history. They also suggest limitations on the role of fitness-relevant processing of information ("survival processing") on cognitive performance.

Rats searched for food in a situation that allowed them to determine which locations contained food after searching a small number of them, but not which of the baited locations contained more-preferred food rather than a less-preferred food. During some experimental trials, the latter information was available from the choices of model rats making choices together with the subject rats, because some of the model rats tended to choose the locations baited with more-preferred food. On the surface, the results suggest that social influence specified the locations of more-preferred food to the subject rats. However, more detailed analysis and data from a second experiment indicate that the social influence can be explained by a general tendency to approach another rat making choices, acquired if rats are exposed to a contingency between social approach and increased foraging success.