Chapter 4 Strategies for Social Learning

Galef, Bennett G.

doi:10.1016/s0065-3454(09)39004-x

Cited by 58 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Humans in experimental settings have strong tendencies to copy the best even when this is not advantageous (Offerman and Schotter, 2009), meaning that the use of performance cues could on occasion result in suboptimal behavior. Our results add weight to a growing literature showing that prevailing conditions and recent experience can influence which social and individual information gathering strategies are employed (Laland, 2004; Kendal et al, 2005; Efferson et al, 2008; Galef, 2009; Leadbeater and Chittka 2009; Toelch et al, 2009; 2010). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Social Performance Cues Induce Behavioral Flexibility in Humans

Toelch¹,

Bruce²,

Meeus³

et al. 2011

Front. Psychology

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Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to react to environmental changes, but changing established behavior carries costs, with unknown benefits. Individuals may thus modify their behavioral flexibility according to the prevailing circumstances. Social information provided by the performance level of others provides one possible cue to assess the potential benefits of changing behavior, since out-performance in similar circumstances indicates that novel behaviors (innovations) are potentially useful. We demonstrate that social performance cues, in the form of previous players’ scores in a problem-solving computer game, influence behavioral flexibility. Participants viewed only performance indicators, not the innovative behavior of others. While performance cues (high, low, or no scores) had little effect on innovation discovery rates, participants that viewed high scores increased their utilization of innovations, allowing them to exploit the virtual environment more effectively than players viewing low or no scores. Perceived conspecific performance can thus shape human decisions to adopt novel traits, even when the traits employed cannot be copied. This simple mechanism, social performance feedback, could be a driver of both the facultative adoption of innovations and cumulative cultural evolution, processes critical to human success.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Social Performance Cues Induce Behavioral Flexibility in Humans

Toelch¹,

Bruce²,

Meeus³

et al. 2011

Front. Psychology

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“…Demonstrator bias (otherwise known as “indirect” or “model-based” bias; Rendell et al 2011) can differ depending on the species. For example, nine-spine sticklebacks, chimpanzees and meerkats are more likely to copy older individuals (Dugatkin and Godin 1993; Thornton and Malapert 2009; Horner et al 2010), while rats ( R. norvegicus ) do not show copying biases relating to demonstrator’s age (Galef 2009). Moreover, a given species can exhibit multiple demonstrator biases, such as copying older and more knowledgeable conspecifics (Kendal et al 2015).…”

Section: Learning Is Biasedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

Greggor

Thornton

Clayton

2016

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Social learning can influence how animals respond to anthropogenic changes in the environment, determining whether animals survive novel threats and exploit novel resources or produce maladaptive behaviour and contribute to human-wildlife conflict. Predicting where social learning will occur and manipulating its use are, therefore, important in conservation, but doing so is not straightforward. Learning is an inherently biased process that has been shaped by natural selection to prioritize important information and facilitate its efficient uptake. In this regard, social learning is no different from other learning processes because it too is shaped by perceptual filters, attentional biases and learning constraints that can differ between habitats, species, individuals and contexts. The biases that constrain social learning are not understood well enough to accurately predict whether or not social learning will occur in many situations, which limits the effective use of social learning in conservation practice. Nevertheless, we argue that by tapping into the biases that guide the social transmission of information, the conservation applications of social learning could be improved. We explore the conservation areas where social learning is highly relevant and link them to biases in the cues and contexts that shape social information use. The resulting synthesis highlights many promising areas for collaboration between the fields and stresses the importance of systematic reviews of the evidence surrounding social learning practices.

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“…Formal theoretical analyses (e.g. 2, 5–9, 11–13, 19) and experimental studies (20–21) have explored a small number of plausible learning strategies. While insightful, this work has focussed on simple rules that can be studied with analytical methods, and can only explore a tiny subset of strategies.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

Rendell

Boyd

Cownden

et al. 2010

Science

662

621

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Social learning (learning through observation or interaction with other individuals) is widespread in nature and is central to the remarkable success of humanity, yet it remains unclear why it pays to copy, and how best to do so. To address these questions we organised a computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (e.g. trial-and-error) to acquire adaptive behavior in a complex environment. Most current theory predicts the emergence of mixed strategies that rely on some combination of the two types of learning. In the tournament, however, strategies that relied heavily on social learning were found to be remarkably successful, even when asocial information was no more costly than social information. Social learning proved advantageous because individuals frequently demonstrated the highest-payoff behavior in their repertoire, inadvertently filtering information for copiers. The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied exclusively on social learning, and weighted information according to the time since acquisition.Human culture is widely thought to underlie the extraordinary demographic success of our species, manifest in virtually every terrestrial habitat (1-2). Cultural processes facilitate the spread of adaptive knowledge, accumulated over generations, allowing individuals to acquire vital life skills. One of the foundations of culture is social learning -learning influenced by observation or interaction with other individuals (3) -which occurs widely, in various forms, * To whom correspondence should be addressed. ler4@st-andrews.ac.uk.One sentence summary: A computer tournament helps to explain why social learning is common in nature and why human beings happen to be so good at it. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptScience. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 November 22. Published in final edited form as:Science. 2010 April 9; 328(5975): 208-213. doi:10.1126/science.1184719. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript across the animal kingdom (4). Yet it remains something of a mystery why it pays individuals to copy others, and how best to do this.At first sight, social learning appears advantageous because it allows individuals to avoid the costs, in terms of effort and risk, of trial-and-error learning. However, social learning can also cost time and effort, and theoretical work reveals that it can be error prone, leading individuals to acquire inappropriate or outdated information in nonuniform and changing environments (5-11). Current theory suggests that to avoid these errors individuals should be selective in when and how they use social learning, so as to balance its advantages against the risks inherent in its indiscriminate use (9). Accordingly, natural selection is expected to have favoured social learning strategies, psychological mechanisms that specify when individuals copy, and from whom they learn (12-13).These issues lie at the interface of multiple academic fields,...

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Chapter 4 Strategies for Social Learning

Cited by 58 publications

References 71 publications

Social Performance Cues Induce Behavioral Flexibility in Humans

Social Performance Cues Induce Behavioral Flexibility in Humans

Harnessing learning biases is essential for applying social learning in conservation

Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament

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