Social Learning: Psychological and Biological Perspectives
... Un effet d'entrainement ou de facilitation sociale peut aussi avoir lieu, c'est-à-dire que le comportement d'un individu est initié ou augmenté par la présence d'un autre individu qui adopte ce comportement (Zentall et Galef, 1988). Par exemple, chez les agneaux, lorsqu'un individu va téter, deux ou trois autres congénères le suivent (Stephens et Baldwin, 1971). ...
... En effet, dans des groupes de quatre individus, lorsqu'une chèvre est à son emplacement, il ne reste plus que trois possibilités aux chèvres restantes pour trouver la station d'alimentation qui leur est attribuée. Ainsi, les individus qui mémorisent plus rapidement leur emplacement vont permettre de limiter le nombre de places restantes pour les individus qui auraient un processus de mémorisation un peu plus long.La facilitation sociale, quant à elle, correspond au fait qu'un animal qui mange, s'approche ou manipule des aliments peut accroitre l'attention portée à ces aliments et encourager ensuite leur consommation par d'autres individus(Zentall et Galef, 1988). Lors de la première découverte de notre dispositif, les chèvres qui vont s'intéresser rapidement aux stations d'alimentation, vont permettre, via la facilitation sociale, de stimuler et d'entrainer les autres individus à s'intéresser aux mangeoires(Figure 22). ...
Les systèmes agricoles évoluent rapidement et sont soumis à des pressions sociétales et économiques croissantes. Un élément clé de leur adaptation consiste à trouver une combinaison optimale entre les capacités des animaux à s’adapter à des environnements changeants, le maintien des performances de production et un pilotage par l’éleveur qui valoriserait au mieux la variabilité individuelle. Le développement de l'élevage de précision, avec la capacité croissante d’enregistrement automatique des paramètres de comportement et de production, permet d'obtenir des informations précises sur le terrain en temps réel. Il est donc impératif que la pertinence biologique des variables mesurées soit connue. Dans ce contexte, le comportement alimentaire, qui constitue une part importante de la description de tout animal de production, est une variable d’intérêt.Cependant, en raison du manque d’études sur ce sujet, nous en savons peu sur le comportement alimentaire d’un individu et en particulier d’un ruminant, et sur ses facteurs de variation.Ce travail de thèse, réalisé chez la chèvre a montré que 1) les chèvres présentent des préférences en termes de position d’alimentation et de types d’aliments offerts, 2) une variabilité inter-individuelle importante du comportement alimentaire existe chez des chèvres hébergées en groupes, tandis que le profil de comportement alimentaire individuel est relativement stable entre les stades physiologiques, 3) lorsque les chèvres sont soumises à challenge alimentaire tel qu’une modification de la fréquence de distribution de la ration, elles adaptent leur comportement alimentaire à ces modifications, mais conservent un profil alimentaire stable.
... Social learning involves at least two agents, at least one of which updates their knowledge base by acquiring information from the other (for details, see Box 1). Classifications of social learning and cognition are wide-ranging and divisive, often dependent on the specialty of the researchers defining the behaviors and their opinions regarding the presence of higher-order animal cognition in nonhuman species (Zentall and Galef, 1988;Choleris and Kavaliers, 1999;Lacey and Solomon, 2003;Zentall, 2006;Olsson and Phelps, 2007;Wolff, 2007;Christov-Moore et al., 2014;Gariépy et al., 2014;Shin, 2016, 2019;Debiec and Olsson, 2017;Kiyokawa and Hennessy, 2018;Morozov, 2018;Sivaselvachandran et al., 2018;Carcea and Froemke, 2019). How social learning in rodents can be classified per se is outside the focus of this review and is further discussed elsewhere (Zentall and Galef, 1988;Zentall, 2006). ...
... Classifications of social learning and cognition are wide-ranging and divisive, often dependent on the specialty of the researchers defining the behaviors and their opinions regarding the presence of higher-order animal cognition in nonhuman species (Zentall and Galef, 1988;Choleris and Kavaliers, 1999;Lacey and Solomon, 2003;Zentall, 2006;Olsson and Phelps, 2007;Wolff, 2007;Christov-Moore et al., 2014;Gariépy et al., 2014;Shin, 2016, 2019;Debiec and Olsson, 2017;Kiyokawa and Hennessy, 2018;Morozov, 2018;Sivaselvachandran et al., 2018;Carcea and Froemke, 2019). How social learning in rodents can be classified per se is outside the focus of this review and is further discussed elsewhere (Zentall and Galef, 1988;Zentall, 2006). In this review, we begin with the notion of a "social engram" and propose the concept as a unifying theme across studies seeking to understand the physical basis of complex cognition and behavior. ...
Many mammals have evolved to be social creatures. In humans, the ability to learn from others' experiences is essential to survival; and from an early age, individuals are surrounded by a social environment that helps them develop a variety of skills, such as walking, talking, and avoiding danger. Similarly, in rodents, behaviors, such as food preference, exploration of novel contexts, and social approach, can be learned through social interaction. Social encounters facilitate new learning and help modify preexisting memories throughout the lifespan of an organism. Moreover, social encounters can help buffer stress or the effects of negative memories, as well as extinguish maladaptive behaviors. Given the importance of such interactions, there has been increasing work studying social learning and applying its concepts in a wide range of fields, including psychotherapy and medical sociology. The process of social learning, including its neural and behavioral mechanisms, has also been a rapidly growing field of interest in neuroscience. However, the term "social learning" has been loosely applied to a variety of psychological phenomena, often without clear definition or delineations. Therefore, this review gives a definition for specific aspects of social learning, provides an overview of previous work at the circuit, systems, and behavioral levels, and finally, introduces new findings on the social modulation of learning. We contextualize such social processes in the brain both through the role of the hippocampus and its capacity to process "social engrams" as well as through the brainwide realization of social experiences. With the integration of new technologies, such as optogenetics, chemogenetics, and calcium imaging, manipulating social engrams will likely offer a novel therapeutic target to enhance the positive buffering effects of social experiences or to inhibit fear-inducing social stimuli in models of anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
... Several of these cases fall into the definition of social learning sensu Box (1984, p. 213) as 'changes in the behaviour of one individual that result partly from paying attention to the behaviour of another' (see also Heyes, 1994Heyes, , 2012 for a more refined definition); yet, the above-mentioned examples may differ with respect to (1) which type of information is transmitted, (2) under which conditions social information is used, and (3) how robust the information transmission is over time, referring to the areas of social learning mechanisms (Zentall & Galef, 1988) social learning strategies (Laland, 2004;Rendell et al., 2011) and behavioural traditions and culture (Whiten, Hinde, Laland, & Christopher, 2011), respectively. ...
... Various social learning mechanisms have been described (Heyes, 2012;Hoppitt & Laland, 2008;Zentall & Galef, 1988), most of which can be well explained by learning theory (Heyes, 1994(Heyes, , 2012 and broadly categorized according to the type of information processed (Zentall, 2004). While surprisingly few studies have been designed to explicitly test for mechanisms at the motivational level (e.g. ...
Social learning is a powerful mechanism of information acquisition and can be found in various species. According to the type of information transmitted, animals may change their motivation to perform actions, shift their perception/attention to relevant stimuli, associate other individuals' behaviours with particular stimuli/events or learn to perform ‘novel’ behaviours. The latter is referred to as imitation and has been considered a cognitively demanding mechanism necessary for high-fidelity copying, which may or may not occur in nonhuman animals. We tested the ability of 20 juvenile ravens to imitate an action demonstrated by a human experimenter. Birds of two test groups could observe a familiar human executing one of two opening techniques at an artificial fruit apparatus (horizontal or vertical hand movements directed towards the same location), whereas birds of a control group observed the human touching but not opening the apparatus. Ravens of both test groups tended to use the same direction of movements as observed, when they opened the apparatus themselves with their beak. Comparison with the control group revealed that ravens had a predisposition to manipulate the apparatus by pecking. Hence, observers of vertical hand movements most likely strengthened their initial preference for executing peck movements towards an item enclosing food, whereas observers of horizontal hand movements started to apply beak/head movements that hardly occur during foraging and are ‘novel’ to this context. Juvenile ravens are thus capable of imitating simple motor actions, even though they may use a different body part to execute the behaviours than human demonstrators.
... For example, more affiliative calves may be more likely to learn from others where and how to eat novel feeds. Seeing another calf eating, approaching, or manipulating feed may increase attention toward the feed and subsequently encourage consumption of feed in other calves, a phenomenon known as social facilitation (Zentall and Galef, 1988). Calves may also gain information about novel feeds through a related mechanism called social learning, in which calves learn by observation of, or interaction with, other individuals (Zentall and Galef, 1988). ...
... Seeing another calf eating, approaching, or manipulating feed may increase attention toward the feed and subsequently encourage consumption of feed in other calves, a phenomenon known as social facilitation (Zentall and Galef, 1988). Calves may also gain information about novel feeds through a related mechanism called social learning, in which calves learn by observation of, or interaction with, other individuals (Zentall and Galef, 1988). Regardless of the mechanism, there is evidence that social housing of calves from an early age results in increased solid feed intake and improved ability to cope with novelty (Bernal-Rigoli et al., 2012;Costa et al., 2015;Miller-Cushon and DeVries, 2016). ...
Performance varies considerably at weaning, perhaps in part because it is associated with the personality traits of the animals. Our objective was to identify calf personality traits using standardized tests and determine whether these were associated with measures of feeding behavior and performance. Fifty-six dairy calves were housed in 7 groups of 8 calves each with access to an automated milk feeder and ad libitum access to water, starter, and hay. We measured starter DMI and the number of unrewarded visits to the automated milk feeder during each of 4 periods: prestep (full milk allowance; 7-41 d of age), step (milk allowance reduced to 50%; 42-50 d of age), weaning (51-54 d of age), and postweaning (55-68 d of age). At 27 and 76 d of age, each calf was subjected to 3 novelty tests: novel environment (30 min), human approach (10 min with an unknown stationary human), and novel object (15 min with a black 140-L bucket). During each of the tests, 7 behaviors were scored: latency to touch and duration of touching the human or object, duration of attentive behavior toward the human or object, number of vocalizations, number of quadrants crossed as a measure of activity, and duration of inactivity, exploration, and playing. Data were averaged across ages and then across tests. Principal component analysis revealed 3 factors (interactive, exploratory-active, and vocal-inactive) that together explained 73% of the variance. Calves that were more exploratory-active began to consume starter at an earlier age and showed greater starter dry matter intake during all experimental periods and greater overall average daily gain. Calves that were more interactive and vocal-inactive had more unrewarded visits to the milk feeder during initial milk reduction. We conclude that personality traits are associated with feeding behavior and performance around weaning.
... Enthusiasm for these well-founded hypotheses-and latterly for classical evolutionary psychology-sometimes spilled over into casual claims that social and asocial learning depend on different psychological processes; that social learning is an 'evolved module' or 'adaptive specialisation'; that minds use fundamentally different, domain-specific algorithms to get information from others. But the nature of the alternative processes was never specified; the black box of social learning remained firmly shut (Heyes et al., 1996;Hoppitt & Laland, 2013;Mobius & Rosenblat, 2014;Zentall et al., 1988). ...
After more than a century in which social learning was blackboxed by evolutionary biologists, psychologists and economists, there is now a thriving industry in cognitive neuroscience producing computational models of learning from and about other agents. This is a hugely positive development. The tools of computational cognitive neuroscience are rigorous and precise. They have the potential to prise open the black box. However, we argue that, from the perspective of a scientific realist, these tools are not yet being applied in an optimal way. To fulfil their potential, the shiny new methods of cognitive neuroscience need to be better coordinated with old-fashioned, contrastive experimental designs. Inferences from model complexity to cognitive complexity, of the kind made by those who favour lean interpretations of behaviour (‘associationists’), require social learning to be tested in challenging task environments. Inferences from cognitive complexity to social specificity, made by those who favour rich interpretations (‘mentalists’), call for non-social control experiments. A parsimonious model that fits current data is a good start, but carefully designed experiments are needed to distinguish models that tell us how social learning could be done from those that tell us how it is really done.
... Critically, such social learning fundamentally relies on affective processes. Social learning has historically been seen as either a nonhuman primate phenomenon that explains how behavior can be learned from conspecifics (Zentall & Galef, 1988), or a human cognitive developmental phenomenon concerned with learning from others' testimony (Harris, 2012). However, affective social learning not only points out that these two branches of social learning originate from the same tree (Gruber et al., 2022), but also that it is possible to learn from others' affective attitudes about the value of objects (e.g., ideas, people, customs). ...
Building on the affectivism approach, we expand on Binz et al.’s meta-learning research program by highlighting that emotion and other affective phenomena should be key to the modeling of human learning. We illustrate the added value of affective processes for models of learning across multiple domains with a focus on reinforcement learning, knowledge acquisition, and social learning.
... Laland and Hoppitt (2003) suggested that nonhuman animals are being judged according to stricter criteria than humans. Interestingly, the field of animal behaviour has recently witnessed unprecedented attention to animal social learning and purported animal culture (e.g., Galef, 1992;Heyes & Galef, 1996;McGrew, 1992;Mundinger, 1980;Zentall & Galef, 1988). Although first struggling with the red herring of near-synonymity (McGrew & Tutin, 1978) in terminology (e.g., using culture in quotation marks, Kummer, 1971; and terms such as protoculture, Menzel, 1972;or sub-culture, Kawamura, 1959), earliest notions of animal culture refer to behaviours characterized by a strong learning component. ...
Scientific interest in the diversity of gestural signalling dates back to the figure of Charles Darwin. More than a hundred years later, there is a considerable body of work describing human gestural diversity across languages and cultures. However, the question of communicative culture in our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, is relatively unexplored. Here, we will stir new interest into this topic by (i) briefly summarizing the current knowledge of animal culture, and (ii) presenting the current knowledge on gesture cultures, diversity and usage in the most common model for early hominid behaviour, the chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes ). We will focus particularly on well-established behaviours being customary in some and absent in other chimpanzee communities, and recently discovered social customs that have been suggested to differ in their form, and/or meaning across populations. We also introduce latest findings on chimpanzees’ gestural diversity, providing further evidence for the role social negotiation plays in gestural acquisition. We conclude that the field has been hampered by misconstruing great ape gestures as FAP’s, a strong research bias on the perspective of signalers only, and a lack of coherent methodology to assess the meaning and context of gestures across sites. We argue for systematic cross-site comparisons by viewing communicative exchanges as negotiations, enabling a unique perspective onto the evolutionary trajectory of culture and communication.
... Thus, this type o f design has also been referred to as a savings method (e.g., Moore, 1992) and a non exposed control method (e.g., Heyes & Dawson, 1990). As Heyes & G alef (1996) note, this was the dominant methodology employed in social learning research reported before the present decade (see, e.g., chapters in Zentall & Galef, 1988), but single actions tests have attracted little interest of late. This is probably because single action tests provide a poor test o f imitation; extensive problems have been identified in a comprehensive review of experiments employing this type of design (Zentall, 1996). ...
This thesis is concerned with methodological problems which may arise when attempting to establish evidence of imitation with a directional control test, such as the bidirectional control procedure (e.g., Heyes and Dawson, 1990). Evidence presented here suggests that an outstanding interpretative issue (the emulation hypothesis) remains for all directional control tests, and the bidirectional control procedure has further interpretative and practical problems of its own (the odour hypothesis and a lack of sensitivity). According to the emulation hypothesis, observers subjected to a directional control test reproduce observed behaviours because they are influenced by visual exposure to the movements of the manipulandum, rather than the body movements of their demonstrators. Differences in humans' capacity to reproduce, while performing a concurrent task, object manipulations in a directional control test (which might be imitated or emulated), and body movements not directed towards an object (which could only be imitated) were interpreted as suggesting that emulation may occur in a directional control test. According to the odour hypothesis, observer rats subjected to the bidirectional control procedure tend to push a joystick in the same direction as their demonstrators because they are influenced by odorous physical traces asymmetrically deposited during demonstration sessions. Some evidence was found which is consistent with this hypothesis when the location of putative demonstration session deposits was independently manipulated in the bidirectional control procedure. A meta-analysis of a large sample of bidirectional control experiments revealed that the effect size for demonstrator-consistent responding in rats was modest. This was interpreted as suggesting that Heyes and Dawson's bidirectional control procedure is not sufficiently sensitive to be of practical use in the investigation of imitation. A more sensitive test was not found either by modifying this procedure, or by applying a modified procedure to capuchin monkeys.
... Beim Nachahmungslernen wirkt Verstarkung zunachst mittel bar; das beobachtende Individuum wird nicht selbst bekraftigt, sondern nimmt wahr, wie das Modell verstarkt wird (Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963). Allerdings konnen nachweislich eine Anzahl weiterer Prozesse die Genese von imitationsartigem Lernen verursachen oder zumindest fordern (Zentall & Galef, 1988 (Fersen, eigene Beobachtung). Delphine sind auBerdem fi.ir ihre Fahigkeit, Tone und Gerausche nachzuahmen, bekannt (Caldwell & Caldwell, 1972). ...
... Social learning is widespread among animals, contributing significantly to behavioral adaptation in both individuals and groups (Zentall and Galef, 1988;Leadbeater and Chittka, 2007;van Schaik, 2010;Hoppitt and Laland, 2013). In addition to elucidating a crucial adaptive mechanism, studies of animal social learning can lead to improved understanding of human pathologies to which social learning contributes, such as anxiety and phobias (Blanchard et al., 2001;Delgado et al., 2006;Mineka and Zinbarg, 2006), or in which it is affected, such as in autism spectrum disorders (Schneider and Przewłocki, 2005;Markram et al., 2008). ...
Social learning is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, where animals learn from group members about predators, foraging strategies, and so on. Despite its prevalence and adaptive benefits, our understanding of social learning is far from complete. Here, we study observational learning in zebrafish, a popular animal model in neuroscience. Toward fine control of experimental variables and high consistency across trials, we developed a novel robotics-based experimental test paradigm, in which a robotic replica demonstrated to live subjects the correct door to join a group of conspecifics. We performed two experimental conditions. In the individual training condition, subjects learned the correct door without the replica. In the social training condition, subjects observed the replica approaching both the incorrect door, to no effect, and the correct door, which would open after spending enough time close to it. During these observations, subjects could not actively follow the replica. Zebrafish increased their preference for the correct door over the course of 20 training sessions, but we failed to identify evidence of social learning, whereby we did not register significant differences in performance between the individual and social training conditions. These results suggest that zebrafish may not be able to learn a route by observation, although more research comparing robots to live demonstrators is needed to substantiate this claim.
... Social facilitation and social learning play important roles in the development of foraging behaviour in neonatal ruminants on pasture (Launchbaugh and Howery, 2005). Social facilitation is the phenomenon where the stimulus of another animal eating, approaching or manipulating feed may increase attention toward the feed, and subsequently encourage consumption of feed by others, whereas social learning describes the mechanism of learning through observation of others (Zentall and Galef, 1988). ...
Individual animals behave differently from one another, especially when confronting challenges such as changes in diet (e.g. weaning), environment (e.g. moving from pasture to feedlot) and social grouping (e.g. movement to lactating group after parturition). Each of these challenges involves some element of novelty, impacting the welfare and productivity of the animal. Indeed, the large individual variability in the development and expression of feeding behaviour cannot be fully explained by differences in genetics, management practices, body size or growth rate. In this review we outline evidence that individual variability in feeding behaviour is associated with the personality of the individual. We focus on three key personality traits: exploration, fear or reactivity and sociability. Individuals differ in how much they explore their feeding environment, with more exploratory individuals being less reactive to novel situations. Feeding behaviour can be impaired in individuals that are especially reactive to a change in their environment, change in diet or handling or restraint by humans. The social environment is also a major factor affecting how individuals express their behaviour. Sociability of the individual, including dominant-subordinate and affiliative relationships, affects how individuals make foraging decisions, gain access to feed and adopt particular social strategies to maintain or adjust feeding patterns when the social environment changes. Personality traits such as exploration, boldness and sociability also affect the use of social information when learning where, how or what to eat. Our review highlights the implications of feeding behaviour variability for the welfare and productivity of the individual, and how an understanding of personality can help tailor management to the needs of the individual.
... Social learning includes imitation, where an action is copied, and emulation, where the goal of the action is understood and the mechanics of the behavior are then reproduced after subsequent trial-and-error learning. Rodents are capable of emulation (Zentall and Galef 1988;Galef 2013) and to the extent that an observer experiences the intent of the demonstrator in emulation, empathy may be involved in social learning. ...
... Animals living in social groups have plenty of opportunities to learn from the behaviour of group mates. A century of social learning research has revealed many examples of observational learning, in a variety of different species and contexts (Galef & Laland, 2005;Heyes & Galef, 1996;Heyes, 1994Heyes, , 2009Hoppitt & Laland, 2008;Huber, 2011;Thorndike, 1898;Thorpe, 1957;Zentall & Galef, 1988;Zentall, 2006). Examples of social influences on the adaptive modification of behaviour range from food selection and predator avoidance (Mineka, Davidson, Cook, & Keir, 1984) to learning of songs (Catchpole & Slater, 2008;Marler & Slabbekoorn, 2004), routes (Helfman & Schultz, 1984) and motor skills (Terkel, 1996). ...
Learning by observing others is especially beneficial for young and naïve individuals. The relationship to the social partner is thus important. While peers are often used as demonstrators to test for social learning abilities in a species, thereby studying horizontal transmission of information, this study focused on the vertical transmission of information, i.e. learning across generations, in a highly social species. Half-a-year-old piglets of the Kune Kune breed, Sus scrofa domesticus (in contrast to the usual subjects in studies on pigs raised and kept in seminatural conditions), were first exposed to their mother or aunt pushing one of two differently coloured bars to either the left or right side to open a sliding door, and were then tested after 1 min, 1 h and 1-day retention intervals. Results indicated that subjects recalled the movement of the door, rather than using local or stimulus enhancement. A second test series revealed that the pigs used the demonstrated opening technique and even remembered it after a delay of 24 h. Nonexposed piglets did not show a side bias during their first encounters with the apparatus; however, habit formation was at play during later test sessions and was possibly the reason for long-term memory of the self-acquired techniques. Altogether, this study revealed that piglets learned how to solve a manipulative foraging problem from both their mother and their aunt, probably by acquiring some information through observation and then memorizing it for up to a day.
... Learning to avoid harm is key to survival. A core feature in humans and other species is the ability to learn such information by observing the behavior of fellow individuals [1][2][3][4] . Although learning which choices to make in order to avoid harm by observing others is often safer than learning by individual trial and error, the usefulness of observational learning depends on both the informational content of the observed behavior as well as if and how this information is used by the observer. ...
Learning what is dangerous by observing others can be safer and more efficient than individual learning. The efficiency of observational learning depends on how observational information is used, something we propose depends on our beliefs’ about others. Here, we investigated how described and actual abilities of another individual (a demonstrator) influenced performance and psychophysiology during learning of an observational avoidance task. Participants were divided into two groups. In each group there were two demonstrators who were described as either high (Described-High group) or low (Described-Low group) in their ability to learn the task. In both groups, one demonstrator had a high ability (Actual-High) and the other had a low ability (Actual-Low) to learn. Participants performed worse in the Described-Low compared to the Described-High group. Pupil dilation, and behavioral data in combination with reinforcement learning modeling, suggested that the described ability influenced performance by affecting the level of attention towards the observational information. Skin conductance responses and pupil dilation provided us with a separate measure of learning in addition to choice behavior.
... One broad definition states that social learning is acquiring knowledge about the animate and inanimate world that is influenced by observation of, or interaction with, another individual or its products. However researchers generally agree that social learning is not a unitary process, and the published taxonomies of social learning explicitly acknowledge that different forms of social learning can potentially be driven by psychological processes that vary in its computational demands [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. ...
Cetaceans are remarkable for exhibiting group-specific behavioral traditions or cultures in several behavioral domains (e.g., calls, behavioral tactics), and the question of whether they can be acquired socially, for example through imitative processes, remains open. Here we used a “Do as other does” paradigm to experimentally study the ability of a beluga to imitate familiar intransitive (body-oriented) actions demonstrated by a conspecific. The participant was first trained to copy three familiar behaviors on command (training phase) and then was tested for her ability to generalize the learned “Do as the other does” command to a different set of three familiar behaviors (testing phase). We found that the beluga (1) was capable of learning the copy command signal “Do what-the-other-does”; (2) exhibited high matching accuracy for trained behaviors (mean = 84% of correct performance) after making the first successful copy on command; (3) copied successfully the new set of three familiar generalization behaviors that were untrained to the copy command (range of first copy = 12 to 35 trials); and (4) deployed a high level of matching accuracy (mean = 83%) after making the first copy of an untrained behavior on command. This is the first evidence of contextual imitation of intransitive (body-oriented) movements in the beluga and adds to the reported findings on production imitation of sounds in this species and production imitation of sounds and motor actions in several cetaceans, especially dolphins and killer whales. Collectively these findings highlight the notion that cetaceans have a natural propensity at skillfully and proficiently matching the sounds and body movements demonstrated by conspecifics, a fitness-enhancing propensity in the context of cooperative hunting and anti-predatory defense tactics, and of alliance formation strategies that have been documented in these species’ natural habitats. Future work should determine if the beluga can also imitate novel motor actions. © 2017 Abramson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
... Individuals must also differentiate between their own and others' outcomes. Such discrimination is also necessary for social learning, which is also widespread across the animal kingdom (e.g., Zentall & Galef, 1988 ). ...
Aversion to inequity is a universal human trait, but recent evidence in other primate and nonprimate species suggests that humans are not the only species to respond negatively to unequal outcomes. Although only about a dozen species have been tested thus far, the emerging phylogenetic patterns help us to understand the evolution of responses to inequity. Negative responses to inequity are not universal, even among the primates, nor are they based upon social tolerance, social group size, or brain size. Instead, what we see is that all of the species that respond to inequity habitually cooperate with nonkin in various contexts, including food sharing, cooperative hunting, coalitions, and alliances. This indicates that inequity responses emerged in conjunction with cooperation. Their likely function is to compare one’s own effort and payoff with that of a partner, and therefore help individuals determine the value of a cooperative partner. In other words, negative reactions to inequity may stabilize cooperation by helping individuals recognize when a cooperative partner is getting more than their “fair share,” which is a cue that it may be time to find a new, more equitable, partner. These negative responses to inequity do not necessarily involve rational or even conscious decision-making, suggesting that they are widespread among animals that cooperate. We end by speculating what these data mean for our understanding of the evolution of fairness in humans, and what this says about the human sense of morality.
... Another way in which social interactions can influence NVP is by aversions that are acquired through sociallymediated conditioning [51,52,53]. Fessler and Navarrette [54] found that ingestive taboos are acquired through socially-mediated conditioning, in which a few members of the culture (perhaps admired individuals) exhibit reluctance to consume a substance and this reluctance becomes prevalent in the group. ...
The etiology of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy (NVP) involves many variables that influence its onset, duration, and severity; and it is well known that its occurrence has health implications for the offspring. This review focuses on psychological and psychosocial factors as influences on NVP (“morning sickness”), including cultural, social, and associative variables. Certain foods are more likely to result in NVP than others, and this often stems from women’s experiential history with those food substances, including the potential to form associative-based aversions. Moreover, acknowledging the role of associative factors could influence the magnitude of NVP. Many demographic variables (e.g., geographical regions, age, socio-economic status) are related to NVP, but whether a population has more women with NVP may be due to certain foods being more common or rare in the diet of that population, as predicted by theories of associative processes. Consideration of the role of associative processes on NVP has implications for understanding its cause and magnitude. Also, mood and poorer psychological adjustment can exacerbate NVP. Issues related to management or treatment of the disorder are reviewed.
... By simply watching others, one cannot learn Tai Chi and downhill skiing (Galef 2013). An alternative idea is that social learning may inherently require trial-and-error learning and understanding of the goal to reproduce a behavior, a concept called "emulation" (Tomasello et al. 1993;Galef 2013;Zentall and Galef 1988). Experiments with puzzle boxes can help uncouple imitation from emulation by requiring learners to reproduce the goal of the behavior (Galef 2013). ...
Natural selection favors individuals to act in their own interests, implying that wild animals experience a competitive psychology. Animals in the wild also express helping behaviors, presumably at their own expense and suggestive of a more compassionate psychology. This apparent paradox can be partially explained by ultimate mechanisms that include kin selection, reciprocity, and multilevel selection, yet some theorists argue such ultimate explanations may not be sufficient and that an additional “stake in others” is necessary for altruism’s evolution. We suggest this stake is the “camaraderie effect,” a by-product of two highly adaptive psychological experiences: social motivation and empathy. Rodents can derive pleasure from access to others and this appetite for social rewards motivates individuals to live together, a valuable psychology when group living is adaptive. Rodents can also experience empathy, the generation of an affective state more appropriate to the situation of another compared to one’s own. Empathy is not a compassionate feeling but it has useful predictive value. For instance, empathy allows an individual to feel an unperceived danger from social cues. Empathy of another’s stance toward one’s self would predict either social acceptance or ostracism and amplify one’s physiological sensitivity to social isolation, including impaired immune responses and delayed wound healing. By contrast, altruistic behaviors would promote well-being in others and feelings of camaraderie from others, thereby improving one’s own physiological well-being. Together, these affective states engender a stake in others necessary for the expression of altruistic behavior.
... Social learning has also been of interest to ethologists and behavioral ecologists because it seems to allow animals to learn about their environments rapidly and efficiently, without having to engage in potentially costly or hazardous learning trials, or expend considerable time and energy exploring the environment. Animals can learn which foods to eat, acquire food processing skills, learn to identify predators, learn which members of the opposite sex to mate with, or develop songs and calls by exploiting the knowledge base of more experienced conspecifics (Heyes and Galef, 1996;Zentall and Galef, 1988). Social learning can be regarded as a shortcut to learning about the environment, but may incur a cost if the acquired knowledge is inappropriate or outdated (Giraldeau et al., 2002). ...
The article reviews the field of animal social learning and culture, covering how and why it is studied in both captive and wild animals, by researchers with often differing agendas. Our increasing understanding of the adaptive value of social learning and culture is discussed as well as the new avenues for research this opens. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is emphasized, which, among other areas, influences theories regarding modularity in the brain, the evolution of social intelligence, and animal conservation and welfare.
... Imitation and emulation (i.e. copying the goal or result of an action sequence or learning about the operating characteristics of objects) are often considered more complex forms of social learning than those already discussed, although some authors argue against that view (Heyes 1999; for reviews and definitions see Custance at al. 1999, Heyes 1994, Heyes & Galef 1996Mineka et al. 1984, Thorpe 1956, Tomasello 1996, Whiten & Ham 1992, Whiten et al. 2004, Zajonc 1965, Zentall 2004, Zentall & Galef 1988). Well-known examples of imitation include vocal imitation, used to increase the repertoire size (Pepperberg 2007), and the imitation of human"s greeting gestures (Moore 1992) in Grey parrots, Psittacus erithacus. ...
Social intelligence is thought to have evolved as an adaptation to the complex situations group-living animals encounter in their daily lives. High levels of sociality provide individuals with opportunities to learn from one another. Social learning provides individuals with a relatively cheap and quick alternative to individual learning. This thesis investigated social learning in three corvid species: gregarious rooks (Corvus frugilegus) and jackdaws (Corvus monedula) and nongregarious,
territorial Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). In addition to that, the
species' social structure was analysed and individual differences between members
of each species were determined. Introducing the field of social learning research,
I presented a new framework for investigating social learning, combining ecology, ethology and evolution. Experiments were conducted within that framework.
I found that rooks and jackdaws develop social bonds and dominance hierarchies, whereas Eurasian jays do not. This is most likely related to their territoriality. In two experiments using two-action tasks, jackdaws learned socially. The underlying social learning mechanism was enhancement, which fits in with their feeding ecology. Rooks did not show social learning when presented with videos of conspecifics opening an apparatus. This might have been due to the difficulty of transferring information from videos or due to an ingrained 'affinity' to innovation and/or rapid trial-and-error learning overriding social learning processes. Individual differences along the bold/shy axis existed in all three species, but they were not stable across contexts. Thus, it seemed that the individuals perceived the two seemingly similar contexts that were designed to
investigate neophobia and exploration (novel object in familiar environment; novel
environment) as two different situations. The information may therefore have been processed by two distinct underlying mechanisms, which elicited different
responses in each of the contexts. The implications of the findings of this thesis
are discussed with regard to the new framework, integrating sociality, social
learning and individual differences with the species' ecology.
... Several researchers have examined the root of fear of snakes as well as its pervasiveness. Some have suggested the fear is innate, but other studies have shown that there is a learned component to snake aversion as well (Ohman & Mineka, 2003;Stanley, 2008;Zentall & Galef, 1988). How much people express fear of snakes as a result of genetics and of learned responses is yet to be determined. ...
“Do young children form important and needed connections with the natural world on school grounds, or is this just a myth?” This paper represents a critical review of biophilia and place attachment literature – both important areas of research in need of a new approach. Researchers Burgess (2009), Chawla (2007), Howell (2003), Kahn (2002), Kellert (2009), and others have called for a need for rigorously controlled, yet rich and experiential, research which advances underlying theories of child-nature connections. Likewise, place attachment research has been conducted largely with adults and needs a more theoretically sound approach to how and why youth attach to certain places beyond favorite places studies. These two areas of research are closely related and have been studied using ethnographic methods (Brooks, 2003; Tuan, 1977), quantitative methods (Harvey, 1989; Stedman, 2002; Vaske & Kobrin, 2001; Williams, 2000), and mixed-methods (Burgess, 2009; Francis, 1995; Hart, 1979; Moore & Wong, 1997). However, few studies have attempted to combine a measure of scientific rigor with a sensitive portrayal of Latino and Latina children’s experience on school grounds. A new interpretation of schoolyards and gardens through the eyes of low-income urban youth is critical if we are to make advancements in child-nature relationship research. General assumptions about youth and benefits of revitalized school grounds abound in gardening and schoolyard literature with little regard to place attachment or biophilia theory. Mixed-methods are recommended to research predominantly Latino urban children’s connections to school ground environments.
Keywords: biophilia, biophobia, nature, place attachment, place dependence, place identity, child-nature relationships, environmental concerns and responsibility, urban youth, children, playgrounds, school grounds, schoolyards, literature review, green infrastructure, biotic and abiotic communities
... Any species that socially learns receives information from a conspecific which changes their behavior, even if they are not consciously aware of it (as they do not need to be consciously aware of inequity for it to provide a benefit). Social learning is widespread among animals (Zentall et al., 1988;Heyes et al., 1996), and some species are quite nuanced, with individuals paying attention to relevant features of the social partner when determining whether to copy their actions (Swaney et al., 2001;Biro et al., 2003;Perry, 2009;Hopper, 2010;Horner et al., 2010). ...
... ciency, and selection of safe foods (Zentall & Galef, 1988). In the present study, observation could only help in gaining information relevant to solving the initial steps for obtaining peanuts (i.e., physical location in stocked zones and proximity to stocked boxes). ...
To assess the relation between performance and social or demographic variables, this study group tested a captive monkey colony on visual and manual discrimination problems. Animals could choose between differently colored, sand-filled boxes, where hue signaled the initial probability of finding buried food items. Dominant animals and subadults were most successful in locating and retrieving incentives, but sex did not affect performance. Rank effects occurred without overt aggression, suggesting deference by subordinates as a mediating mechanism. Age effects may reflect changing attention patterns only evident in complex arenas where cue salience becomes diluted. Because these findings differ from studies of singly tested animals, they show that, in a social context, an individual's rank and age may define opportunities to gain or efficiently use information.
Stigmergy is a generic coordination mechanism widely used by animal societies, in which traces left by individuals in a medium guide and stimulate their subsequent actions. In humans, new forms of stigmergic processes have emerged through the development of online services that extensively use the digital traces left by their users. Here we combine interactive experiments with faithful data-based modeling to investigate how groups of individuals exploit a simple rating system and the resulting traces in an information search task in competitive or non-competitive conditions. We find that stigmergic interactions can help groups to collectively find the cells with the highest values in a table of hidden numbers. We show that individuals can be classified into three behavioral profiles that differ in their degree of cooperation. Moreover, the competitive situation prompts individuals to give deceptive ratings and reinforces the weight of private information versus social information in their decisions.
Response facilitation has often been portrayed as a “low level” category of social learning, because the demonstrator’s action, which is already in the observer’s repertoire, automatically triggers that same action, rather than induces the learning of a new action. One way to rule out response facilitation consists of introducing a delay between the demonstrator’s behavior and the observer’s response to let their possible effects wear off. However, this may not rule out “delayed response facilitation” in which the subject could be continuously “mentally rehearsing” the demonstrated actions during the waiting period. We used a do-as-the-other-did paradigm in two orcas to study whether they displayed cognitive control regarding their production of familiar actions by (1) introducing a delay ranging from 60 to 150 s between observing and producing the actions and (2) interspersing distractor (non-target) actions performed by the demonstrator and by the subjects during the delay period.
These two manipulations were aimed at preventing the mental rehearsal of the observed actions during the delay period. Both orcas copied the model’s target actions on command after various delay periods, and crucially, despite the presence of distractor actions. These findings suggest that orcas are capable of selectively retrieving a representation of an observed action to generate a delayed matching response. Moreover, these results lend further support to the proposal that the subjects’ performance relied not only on a mental representation of the specific actions that were requested to copy, but also flexibly on the abstract and domain general rule requested by the specific “copy command”. Our findings strengthen the view that orcas and other cetaceans are capable of flexible and controlled social learning.
This chapter presents a detailed example of expressive music performance that focuses on performance creativity.
The paired development of an individual’s knowledge and interest in an object/topic has well-established theoretical and empirical support. Their shared role within learning experiences has similar support but has less often been researched intensively in formal contexts such as classrooms. To address this gap, four studies in four foundation university courses were conducted across an academic semester. The research was conducted at one research intensive university in Hong Kong, with a mixture of first- and second-year students. This research was embedded into course lectures/tutorials by utilising a mobile platform to conduct short formative tests and surveys (QR codes presented with course materials). Difference testing compared pre-post domain interest and levels of interest in different tasks. Structural equation modelling tested the predictive relationships between prior domain interest and knowledge with students' interest in a range of lecture and tutorial tasks, and later interest in the course and/or domain. The pattern of results from the four studies suggest separate and sometimes contrasting roles for prior interest and knowledge within task interest. Findings confirmed the critical role of social learning experiences for building interest in courses. These studies support the evidenced based strategic choice of a variety of course tasks to ensure students individual differences are addressed and long-term interest is supported. The theoretical and practical implications, as well as future directions for research in this area are discussed.
Humans possess a perhaps unique type of culture among primates called cumulative culture. In this type of culture, behavioural forms cumulate changes over time, which increases their complexity and/or efficiency, eventually making these forms culture‐dependent. As changes cumulate, culture‐dependent forms become causally opaque, preventing the overall behavioural form from being acquired by individuals on their own; in other words, culture‐dependent forms must be copied between individuals and across generations. Despite the importance of cumulative culture for understanding the evolutionary history of our species, how and when cumulative culture evolved is still debated. One of the challenges faced when addressing these questions is how to identify culture‐dependent forms that result from cumulative cultural evolution. Here we propose a novel method to identify the most likely cases of culture‐dependent forms. The ‘Method of Local Restriction’ is based on the premise that as culture‐dependent forms are repeatedly transmitted via copying, these forms will unavoidably cumulate population‐specific changes (due to copying error) and therefore must be expected to become locally restricted over time. When we applied this method to our closest living relatives, the great apes, we found that most known ape behavioural forms are not locally restricted (across domains and species) and thus are unlikely to be acquired via copying. Nevertheless, we found 25 locally restricted forms across species and domains, three of which appear to be locally unique (having been observed in a single population of a single species). Locally unique forms represent the best current candidates for culture‐dependent forms in non‐human great apes. Besides these rare exceptions, our results show that overall, ape cultures do not rely heavily on copying, as most ape behaviours appear across sites and/or species, rendering them unlikely to be culture‐dependent forms resulting from cumulative cultural evolution. Yet, the locally restricted forms (and especially the three locally unique forms) identified by our method should be tested further for their potential reliance on copying social learning mechanisms (and in turn, for their potential culture‐dependence). Future studies could use the Method of Local Restriction to investigate the existence of culture‐dependent forms in other animal species and in the hominin archaeological record to estimate how widespread copying is in the animal kingdom and to postulate a timeline for the emergence of copying in our lineage.
Debates concerning social learning in the behavioural and the developmental cognitive sciences have largely ignored the literature on social influence in the affective sciences despite having arguably the same object of study. We argue that this is a mistake and that no complete model of social learning can exclude an affective aspect. In addition, we argue that affect can allow bridging of the debates of the unique characteristics of social learning in humans compared to other animals. We first review the two major bodies of literature in non-human animals and human development, highlighting the fact that the former has adopted a behavioural approach while the latter has adopted a cognitive approach, leading to irreconcilable differences. We then introduce a novel framework, affective social learning (ASL), that studies the way we learn about value(s). We show that all three approaches are complementary and focus, respectively, on behaviour towards, cognitions concerning, and feelings about objects, events and people in our environment. All three thus contribute to an affective, behavioural and cognitive story of knowledge transmission: the ABC of social learning. In particular, ASL can provide the backbone of an integrative approach to social learning. We argue that this novel perspective on the debate concerning social learning can allow both evolutionary continuity and ontogenetic development by lowering the cognitive thresholds that appear often too complex for other species and non-verbal infants. Yet, it can also explain some of the major achievements only found in human cultures.
El comportamiento de los seres humanos, como el del resto de los animales, se ve modulado por el grupo social al que pertenece. La agrupación de los seres humanos ha sido parte importante en el proceso evolutivo, al incrementar su capacidad de adaptación al medio. Si embargo, en sociedades tan amplias y complejas como las actuales, los sistemas de defensa propios del grupo se podrían volver desadaptativos. En concreto, el aprendizaje social y la rápida transmisión de la información en contextos de peligro e incertidumbre podrían generar altos niveles de activación emocional, descontrol de la situación y escasez de recursos. Una de las claves para mejorar la respuesta del grupo ante estas condiciones podría consistir en buscar el punto óptimo de activación emocional de la población, que evite tanto la subestimación como la sobrestimación de los peligros asociados con la emergencia.
This chapter reviews the diversity of cognitive abilities among a range of animal species that have been observed in their natural habitat. Investigations of classical conditioning took place in laboratory settings, and even there are few demonstrations of this form of learning in free‐ living animals. It is important to remember that demonstrations of higher cognitive abilities in animals also often interact with classical and operant conditioning processes. Zoos and aquariums can also be useful in sending conservation messages about the impact of human‐induced changes in native habitats, as well as what animals can learn as a result of changing environmental conditions. Animals learn a great deal of valuable information from conspecifics in the wild. Wild animals, especially birds and primates exhibit an impressive array of cognitive abilities: tool use, spatial learning, memory, discrimination, observational and social learning, imitation, and cultural transmission.
Recent research suggests that personality, defined as consistent individual behavioral variation, in farm animals could be an important factor when considering their health, welfare, and productivity. However, behavioral tests are often performed individually and they might not reflect the behavioral differences manifested in every-day social environments. Furthermore, the contextual and longer-term temporal stability of personality traits have rarely been investigated in adult dairy cattle. In this study, we tested three groups of lactating Holstein cows (40 cows) using an individual arena test and a novel object test in groups to measure the contextual stability of behavior. Among the recorded individual test parameters, we used seven in the final analysis, which were determined by a systematic parameter reduction procedure. We found positive correlations between novel object contact duration in the group test and individual test parameters object contact duration (Rs = 0.361, P = 0.026) and movement duration (Rs = 0.336, P = 0.039). Both tests were repeated 6 months later to investigate their temporal stability whereby four individual test parameters were repeatable. There was no consistency in the group test results for 25 cows tested twice, possibly due to group composition changes. Furthermore, based on the seven individual test parameters, two personality traits (activity/exploration and boldness) were identified by principal component analysis. We found a positive association between the first and second tests for activity/exploration (Rs = 0.334, P = 0.058) and for boldness (Rs = 0.491, P = 0.004). Our results support the multidimensional nature of personality in adult dairy cattle and they indicate a link between behavior in individual and within-group situations. The lack of stability according to the group test results implies that group companions might have a stronger influence on individual behavior than expected. We suggest repeating the within-group behavioral measurements to study the relationship between the social environment and the manifestation of personality traits in every-day situations.
Instead of describing the fields of anthropology, economics, management, political science, economics, psychology, or sociology, this chapter explores movement and direction in the study of human well-being, sense-making, and decision-making which are areas of study traversing the social sciences. It features fresh perspectives gleaned from leading edge human brain research as well as current applications of long-standing explanations of what moves people.
Designing experiments on social learning using an untested behaviour or species requires baseline knowledge of how the animals will perform. We conducted a pilot study of a procedure for rapidly testing social learning in the highly social common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) using a simple maze. To create demonstrators, we allowed captive bats to learn to exit a three-dimensional maze, which reunited them with their colony as a reward. We then filmed naive bats in the same maze, comparing their ability to exit the maze before, during and after the addition of a trained demonstrator. The presence of a demonstrator increased the exit rates of naive bats, presumably by attracting the attention of the naive bats to the maze exit. Four of the five naive bats that exited in the presence of a demonstrator retained the ability to exit without the demonstrator. No naive bat exited during trials without a potential demonstrator present. This experimental procedure appears to be a promising approach for efficient tests of social learning in vampire bats because maze difficulty can be manipulated to adjust learning rates and each trial requires only 15 min.
The ratchet effect–the gradual accumulation of changes within a cultural trait beyond a level that individuals can achieve on their own–arguably rests on two key cognitive abilities: high-fidelity social learning and innovation. Researchers have started to simulate the ratchet effect in the laboratory to identify its underlying social learning mechanisms, but studies on the developmental origins of the ratchet effect remain sparse. We used the transmission chain method and a tower construction task that had previously been used with adults to investigate whether “generations” of children between 4 and 6 years were able to make a technological product that individual children could not yet achieve. 21 children in a baseline and 80 children in transmission chains (each consisting of 10 successive children) were asked to build something as tall as possible from plasticine and sticks. Children in the chains were presented with the constructions of the two preceding generations (endstate demonstration). Results showed that tower heights did not increase across the chains nor were they different from the height of baseline towers, demonstrating a lack of improvement in tower height. However, we found evidence for cultural lineages, i.e., construction styles: towers within chains were more similar to each other than to towers from different chains. Possible explanations for the findings and directions for future research are suggested.
The lasting behavioral changes elicited by social signals provide important adaptations for survival of organisms that thrive as a group. Unlike the rapid innate responses to social cues, such adaptations have been understudied. Here, the rodent models of the lasting socially induced behavioral changes are presented as either modulations or reinforcements of the distinct forms of learning and memory or non‐associative changes of affective state. The purpose of this categorization is to draw attention to the potential mechanistic links between the neuronal pathways that process social cues and the neuronal systems that mediate the well‐studied forms of learning and memory.
As machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence progress, more complex tasks can be addressed, quite often by cascading or combining existing models and technologies, known as the bottom-up design. Some of those tasks are addressed by agents, which attempt to simulate or emulate higher cognitive abilities that cover a broad range of functions; hence, those agents are named cognitive agents. We formulate, implement, and evaluate such a cognitive agent, which combines learning by example with ML. The mechanisms, algorithms, and theories to be merged when training a cognitive agent to read and learn how to represent knowledge have not, to the best of our knowledge, been defined by the current state-of-the-art research. The task of learning to represent knowledge is known as semantic parsing, and we demonstrate that it is an ability that may be attained by cognitive agents using ML, and the knowledge acquired can be represented by using conceptual graphs. By doing so, we create a cognitive agent that simulates properties of “learning by example,” while performing semantic parsing with good accuracy. Due to the unique and unconventional design of this agent, we first present the model and then gauge its performance, showcasing its strengths and weaknesses.
Understanding the ways in which individuals cope with threats, respond to challenges, make use of opportunities and mediate the harmful effects of their surroundings is important for predicting their ability to function in a rapidly changing world. Perhaps one of the most essential drivers of coping behaviour of adults is the environment experienced during their early-life development. Although the study of coping, defined as behaviours displayed in response to environmental challenges, has a long and rich research history in biology, recent literature has repeatedly pointed out that the processes through which coping behaviours develop in individuals are still largely unknown. In this review, we make a move towards integrating ultimate and proximate lines of coping behaviour research. After broadly defining coping behaviours (1), we review why, from an evolutionary perspective, the development of coping has become tightly linked to the early-life environment (2), which relevant developmental processes are most important in creating coping behaviours adjusted to the early-life environment (3), which influences have been shown to impact those developmental processes (4) and what the adaptive significance of intergenerational transmission of coping behaviours is, in the context of behavioural adaptations to a fast changing world (5). Important concepts such as effects of parents, habitat, nutrition, social group and stress are discussed using examples from empirical studies on mammals, fish, birds and other animals. In the discussion, we address important problems that arise when studying the development of coping behaviours and suggest solutions.
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Five-Factor Theory provides a broad but largely blank template for causal personality research. Within Five-Factor Theory, there are three major categories of questions: (1) how do biological structures and functions lead to trait levels? (2) how do traits and the environment give rise to acquired psychological institutions? and (3) how do personality characteristics interact with specific situations to determine behaviours and reactions? Both practical and ethical issues complicate the search for the causes of trait change. Causal explanations of the development of characteristic adaptations are likely to be incomplete, because there are many different ways in which the same adaptation may be acquired. Studies of the determinants of behaviour are usually left to social, educational, or clinical psychologists—although personality psychologists may make distinctive contributions by emphasizing the role of the individual in selecting and creating situations. A causal understanding of the functioning of the personality system is possible through the integration of many lines of evidence, but it is likely to take a very long time. In the meanwhile, personality psychologists may fruitfully pursue the identification of practical causes by which individuals with a given set of traits can optimize their adaptation. Copyright © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology
Aside from those who have been inspired by Griffin’s writings on cognitive ethology (Griffin, 1984, 1992), most students of bird behavior are unaware that a major revolution has overtaken scientific thinking about the behavior of primates and other mammals. The cognitive revolution took psychology by storm some years ago and, for many primatologists and psychologists, supplemented, and even superseded, more traditional approaches to the study of behavior, especially behavior of a social nature. This revolution led students of primate social behavior to focus on new kinds of questions that rarely arise in more traditionally oriented studies of the social behavior of birds. Although research on avian cognition figured prominently in the activities of early ethologists (e.g. Koehler, 1943, 1956a, 1956b; Thorpe, 1963), it fell from fashion. Instead, in the hands of behavioral ecologists and students of social evolution, economically inspired cost–benefit studies and kin selection theorizing became the driving forces behind most investigations of the behavior of birds, both in the field and in the laboratory.
As they grow up, children construct views of themselves and their place in the world, known as their self-concept. This topic has often been addressed by social psychologists (studying how the self-concept is influenced by social contexts) and developmental psychologists (studying how the self-concept changes over time). Yet, relatively little is known about the origins of the self-concept. This article calls for research that bridges social and developmental psychology to illuminate this important issue. Adopting such a social-developmental approach, the current special section shows that children construct their self-concept based on the social relationships they have, the feedback they receive, the social comparisons they make, and the cultural values they endorse. These findings underline the deeply social nature of self-development.
The social world offers a wealth of opportunities to learn from others, and across the animal kingdom individuals capitalize on those opportunities. Here, we explore the role of natural selection in shaping the processes that underlie social information use, using a suite of experiments on social insects as case studies. We illustrate how an associative framework can encompass complex, context-specific social learning in the insect world and beyond, and based on the hypothesis that evolution acts to modify the associative process, suggest potential pathways by which social information use could evolve to become more efficient and effective. Social insects are distant relatives of vertebrate social learners, but the research we describe highlights routes by which natural selection could coopt similar cognitive raw material across the animal kingdom.
Neonatal imitation is the matching of (often facial) gestures by newborn infants. Some studies suggest that performance of facial gestures is due to general arousal, which may produce false positives on neonatal imitation assessments. Here we examine whether arousal is linked to facial gesturing in newborn infant rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). We tested 163 infants in a neonatal imitation paradigm in their first postnatal week and analyzed their lipsmacking gestures (a rapid opening and closing of the mouth), tongue protrusion gestures, and yawn responses (a measure of arousal). Arousal increased during dynamic stimulus presentation compared to the static baseline across all conditions, and arousal was higher in the facial gestures conditions than the nonsocial control condition. However, even after controlling for arousal, we found a condition-specific increase in facial gestures in infants who matched lipsmacking and tongue protrusion gestures. Thus, we found no support for the arousal hypothesis. Consistent with reports in human newborns, imitators’ propensity to match facial gestures is based on abilities that go beyond mere arousal. We discuss optimal testing conditions to minimize potentially confounding effects of arousal on measurements of neonatal imitation. © 2017, Public Library of Science. All rights reserved. This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
A vital prerequisite for cumulative culture, a phenomenon often asserted to be unique to humans, is the ability to modify behaviour and flexibly switch to more productive or efficient alternatives. Here, we first established an inefficient solution to a foraging task in five captive chimpanzee groups (N = 19). Three groups subsequently witnessed a conspecific using an alternative, more efficient, solution. When participants could successfully forage with their established behaviours, most individuals did not switch to this more efficient technique; however, when their foraging method became substantially less efficient, nine chimpanzees with socially-acquired information (four of whom witnessed additional human demonstrations) relinquished their old behaviour in favour of the more efficient one. Only a single chimpanzee in control groups, who had not witnessed a knowledgeable model, discovered this. Individuals who switched were later able to combine components of their two learned techniques to produce a more efficient solution than their extensively used, original foraging method. These results suggest that, although chimpanzees show a considerable degree of conservatism, they also have an ability to combine independent behaviours to produce efficient compound action sequences; one of the foundational abilities (or candidate mechanisms) for human cumulative culture.
What, if anything, is special about human imitation? An evaluation of enculturated apes' imitation skills, a "best case scenario" of non-human apes' imitation performance, reveals important similarities and differences between this special population of apes and human children. Candidates for shared imitation mechanisms include the ability to imitate various familiar transitive responses and object-object actions that involve familiar tools. Candidates for uniquely derived imitation mechanisms include: imitating novel transitive actions and novel tool-using responses as well as imitating opaque or intransitive gestures, regardless of familiarity. While the evidence demonstrates that enculturated apes outperform non-enculturated apes and perform more like human children, all apes, regardless of rearing history, generally excel at imitating familiar, over-rehearsed responses and are poor, relative to human children, at imitating novel, opaque or intransitive responses. Given the similarities between the sensory and motor systems of preschool age human children and non-human apes, it is unlikely that differences in sensory input and/or motor-output alone explain the observed discontinuities in imitation performance. The special rearing history of enculturated apes-including imitation-specific training-further diminishes arguments suggesting that differences are experience-dependent. Here, it is argued that such differences are best explained by distinct, specialized mechanisms that have evolved for copying rules and responses in particular content domains. Uniquely derived social and imitation learning mechanisms may represent adaptations for learning novel communicative gestures and complex tool-use. Given our species' dependence on both language and tools, mechanisms that accelerated learning in these domains are likely to have faced intense selective pressures, starting with the earliest of human ancestors.
Adaptation via differential success among competing individuals creates winners and losers. But adaptation via cultural group selection creates benefits that are shared among group members. During the twentieth century, evolutionary biologists and economists developed parallel theories of rationality, the gene’s eye view and rational choice theory, which imagine humans as self-interested individuals maximizing consumption of scarce resources. When rational choice theory was applied to agricultural development in the Green Revolution programs of the 1940s to the 1980s, it turned otherwise cooperative farmers into competitors for cash profits, resulting in a process akin to differential mortality, generating wealth for some but exacerbating poverty for many. I suggest that evolutionary biology may offer an alternative view of human rationality, one consistent with ethnographic evidence of farmers’ behavior. One emerging candidate for a “Rationality 2.0” assumes cultural inheritance, cultural group selection, strong reciprocity, and bounded rationality. Farmers make decisions that balance individual benefits with family and community well-being. While the new Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA) seeks technical solutions within its seeds, soils, policy, and markets programs, Rationality 2.0 suggests that AGRA should also promote community cohesion, autonomy, human capability, and reduced dependence on imported technology.
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