Social Learning Flashcards
What is social learning
Learning from other’s behaviors
What four questions arise from the definition of social learning
Is learning from others different in mechanism or in function to learning from own experiences?
Is social learning associated with special intelligence?
Under what circumstances is it better to learn from others than through own experience (and vice versa)?
What, when, and from whom should animals learn socially?
What is one animal that exhibits social learning and how?
Blue tits - many of them started knowing how to open milk bottles
What five processes could the transmission of bottle opening be due to?
Imitation
Emulation
Stimulus enhancement
Local enhancement
Social facilitation
Imitation
Copying sequences of anothers actions.
Implies putting theirselves in someone else’s place
Emulation
Striving for the same outcome as the other, but does not copy actions
Stimulus enhancement
Interactions with object draws an observers attention to it.
Observer tries out various things, and eventually learns how to perform an action
Local enhancement
Activity of a conspecific at a specific site attracts observer to same site.
Leads to observer interacting with objects at the site.
Learns again by trial and error
Social facilitation
Presence of conspecific acts to increase general activity level in observer and reduces neophobia
Facilitates obervers interactions with objects in the environment
What is conspecific
Belonging to same species
What is neophobia
Fear of anything new/unfamiliar
Describe rat’s food preferences
Prefer to eat foods others have eaten
Leads to social transmission of food habits
Describe mobbing responses in blackbirds
Young birds learn to target mobbing through the influence of others’ behavior
Mobbing and certain targets seem pre-programmed, but new targets can be learned socially
Describe mobbing across generations in blackbirds
Multi-generational transmission
What is crucial in the case of black bird mobbing and why
Sovial factor is crucial because blackbirds respond directly to (and learn from) their own species’ mobbing calls
What type of conditioning is blackbird mobbing
Observational conditioning
What is an animal that can aquire novel actions through social learning, and which action is it?
Black rats can learn to strip pinecones for food
In which conditions can pinecone stripping in black rats be learned?
PCS’s pups + PCS mothers
Naive’s pups + PCS mothers
Naive adults + partially stripped cones
How can transmission of novel skills occur?
Through the products of others activity
What is not needed in the learning of pinecone stripping
Special attention to conspecifics
What is the learning of pine cone stripping known as?
Stimulus enhancement
How was the opening of milk bottles by black capped chickadees studied?
They were allowed to observe demonstrations or to interact with bottles
What were the four conditions of the milk bottle experiment and their outcomes?
Demonstrator present and seen opening bottle (learn - imitation/emulation)
No demonstrator present, milk bottle is already open (learn - stimulus/local enhancement)
No demonstrator present, bottle is closed (no learn)
Demonstrator present but not seen opening bottle and bottle is closed (learn - social facilitation)
In an experiment of bees, how did being in a social group impact learning?
More social observers learnt the task than individual innovators (social learning is important)
What happened with non-social bee observers
Did not learn the task (observation of conspecific is important)
What did a detailed analysis of observer’s behavior reveal?
They learn by attending to
- Demonstrator location of activity (local enhancement)
- Position of string (stimulus enhancement)
Which non-social animal exhibited social learning
Red footed tortoises
What task was used on red-footed tortoises
Detour task
What happened in the detour task
Couldnt learn to solve task alone.
After watching demonstrator, all subjects solved the task