Social Information Transmission in Animals: Lessons from Studies of Diffusion

Duboscq, Julie; Romano, Valéria; MacIntosh, Andrew J. J.; Sueur, Cédric

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01147

Cited by 56 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 163 publications

(241 reference statements)

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“…There are several sex‐independent mechanisms through which spending more time socially can increase an individual's chances of finding food, ranging from social facilitation to information sharing (Giraldeau & Caraco, ). For example, spending time near conspecifics likely results in greater exposure to social information (Danchin et al, ; Duboscq, Romano, MacIntosh, & Sueur, ). Interestingly, our data suggest that male guppies increased time spent with conspecifics of both sexes when in mixed compositions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Females facilitate male food patch discovery in a wild fish population

Snijders

Kurvers

Krause

et al. 2019

Journal of Animal Ecology

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1. Responding to the information provided by others is an important foraging strategy in many species. Through social foraging, individuals can more efficiently find unpredictable resources and thereby increase their foraging success.2. When individuals are more socially responsive to particular phenotypes than others, however, the advantage they obtain from foraging socially is likely to depend on the phenotype composition of the social environment. We tested this hypothesis by performing experimental manipulations of guppy, Poecilia reticulata, sex compositions in the wild.3. Males found fewer novel food patches in the absence of females than in mixedsex compositions, while female patch discovery did not differ regardless of the presence or absence of males. 4. We argue that these results were driven by sex-dependent mechanisms of social association: Markov chain-based fission-fusion modelling revealed that less social individuals found fewer patches and that males reduced sociality when females were absent. In contrast, females were similarly social with or without males. Our findings highlight the relevance of considering how individual-and popula-tion-level traits interact in shaping the advantages of social foraging in the wild. K E Y W O R D Sfission-fusion, foraging ecology, guppy, Markov chain analysis, Poecilia reticulata, sex ratio, social facilitation, social learning | INTRODUC TI ON

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Females facilitate male food patch discovery in a wild fish population

Snijders

Kurvers

Krause

et al. 2019

Journal of Animal Ecology

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“…[8,9]), aiming to assess the importance of social transmission in the spread of behaviour, and elucidate typical pathways of transmission. However, in many cases it can be challenging to determine whether the spread of innovations is caused by social transmission, or purely the product of asocial learning (see also [10]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The conceptual foundations of network-based diffusion analysis: choosing networks and interpreting results

Hoppitt¹

2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) is a statistical technique for detecting the social transmission of behavioural innovations in groups of animals, including humans. The strength of social transmission is inferred from the extent to which the diffusion (spread) of the innovation follows a social network. NBDA can have two goals: (a) to establish whether social transmission is occurring and how strong its effects are; and/or (b) to establish the typical pathways of information transfer. The technique has been used in a range of taxa, including primates, cetaceans, birds and fish, using a range of different types of network. Here I investigate the conceptual underpinnings of NBDA, in order to establish the meaning of results using different networks. I develop a model of the social transmission process where each individual observation of the target behaviour affects the rate at which the observer learns that behaviour. I then establish how NBDAs using different networks relate to this underlying process, and thus how we can interpret the results of each. My analysis shows that a different network or networks are appropriate depending on the specific goal or goals of the study, and establishes how the parameter estimates yielded from an NBDA can be interpreted for different networks.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.

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“…Coussi- Korbel and Fragaszy (1995) argue that certain characteristics of the individual conveying information (e.g., the demonstrator), such as age, sex, dominance status, level of success (i.e., mating/foraging), or the relationship to the focal individual, should afect the likelihood of social learning occurring (referred to as 'directed social learning'). Such context dependent social learning has fundamental implications for the way in which information is transferred through animal populations (Kawai 1965;van de Waal et al 2010;Aplin et al 2015;Duboscq et al 2016). Despite this, relatively few studies have experimentally tested the extent to which individuals discriminate between social information sources (see Nicol and Pope 1994;Swaney et al 2001;Schwab et al 2008;Noble et al 2014;Kar et al 2017).…”

Section: U N C O R R E C T E D P R O O Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mate familiarity and social learning in a monogamous lizard

et al. 2018

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Social learning is thought to be advantageous as it allows an animal to gather information quickly without engaging in costly trial-and-error learning. However, animals should be selective about when and whom they learn from. Familiarity is predicted to positively influence an animal's reliance on social learning; yet, few studies have empirically tested this theory. We used a lizard (Liopholis whitii) that forms long-term monogamous pair bonds to examine the effects of partner familiarity on social learning in two novel foraging tasks, an association and a reversal task. We allowed female lizards to observe trained conspecifics that were either familiar (social mate) or unfamiliar execute these tasks and compared these two groups with control females that did not receive social information. Lizards preferentially relied on trial-and-error learning in the association task. In the reversal task, lizards that were demonstrated by familiar partners learnt in fewer trials compared to control lizards and made more correct choices. Our results provide some evidence for context-dependent learning with lizards differentiating between when they utilize social learning, and, to a limited degree, whom they learnt from. Understanding the role of the social context in which learning occurs provides important insights into the benefits of social learning and sociality more generally.

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Social Information Transmission in Animals: Lessons from Studies of Diffusion

Cited by 56 publications

References 163 publications

Females facilitate male food patch discovery in a wild fish population

Females facilitate male food patch discovery in a wild fish population

The conceptual foundations of network-based diffusion analysis: choosing networks and interpreting results

Mate familiarity and social learning in a monogamous lizard

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