Social Learning Flashcards
Behaviour resulting from social learning:
- Must be a learned behavior
- It must be acquired through social transmission
- It must persist in the absence of the demonstrator
Wynne and Udell (2013)
Social facilitation
Increase in behavior due to presence of others performing that behaviour (e.g., humans yawning, budgerigars stretching [Gallup et al., 2017], migration of sea turtle hatchlings, herd behaviour)
Stimulus and local enhancement
Increase in tendency to interact with object (stimulus) or approach location (local) because of presence/actions of others.
Affordance learning
Learning about what can be done with objects or the environment – not necessary to have observed from another.
Different types of social influence
Social facilitation
Stimulus and local enhancement
Affordance learning
Food preferences
Wrenn et al. (2003)
Observer mice ate more of the cued food than novel food
Amount consumed correlated with number of sniffs
Social or independent learning?
Potato washing by macaques
1953 – Imo (female) was seen to wash potatoes before eating them
By 1958 14/15 juveniles, 2/11 adults were washing potatoes
Probably not true imitation:
•Human intervention? Potatoes given to monkeys that washed them
•Acquisition of behaviour very slow (mean & median = 2 years)
•Rate of recruitment did not increase
Observational conditioning
Mineka and Cook (1988) Monkeys fear of snakes
Laboratory-reared monkeys observed a wild-reared monkey’s reactions to a real snake (boa constrictor), a model snake, and a toy snake
After the observation, the observer monkeys displayed more avoidance and fear behaviors than before the observation.
Imitation
Copying another’s behaviour exactly to reach the same goal
Social traditions culture
Emulation
Exact actions not reproduced by observer but aims for same goal. Or actions are reproduced but for a different goal.
Bidirectional task
Heyes and Dawson (1990)
- Rats observed a demonstrator pushing a joystick to left/right for a food reward
- Observers were then given access to joystick
Results: Left observers made more left pushes than Right observers
Not stimulus enhancement (one manipulandem, demonstrator not present during test).
Odour?
Two-action procedure
Atkins and Zentall (1996)
Trained Japanese quail to manipulate a treadle for a food reward
Peck with beak or step with foot
Observers made more responses with the same part of their body as used by the demonstrator
Not stimulus enhancement
Also, quail more likely to copy behaviour if they observed the demonstrator get a reward (Akins & Zentall, 1998)
Chimps & children
Horner and Whiten (2005)
- Chimpanzees and young human children shown demonstrations of how to open a puzzle box
- Demonstrations included unnecessary behaviours
- When box was opaque, chimps and children imitate sequence
- When box was transparent, only children imitated. However, chimpanzees didn’t perform the unnecessary behaviours
Imitation employed at the expense of efficiency in humans?
Emulation employed at the expense of true copying in chimps?
Caro and Hauser (1992) definition of teaching
➢Teacher must modify its behaviour in the presence of naïve observer
➢There is a cost to the teacher (or no immediate benefit)
➢The pupil acquires knowledge or learns a skill earlier or faster or more efficiently than it otherwise would have/not learn at all
Meerkats
Thornton & McAuliffe (2006)
Helpers modify their behaviour in the presence of pups
•Helpers adjust killing or disabling prey depending on pup age
•Monitoring pups, nudging behaviour
Helpers gained no direct benefit and incurred costs
•Monitoring time
•Prey might escape
Helper provision is important in pups developing prey handling skills
•Experiment: 3 days training
•four dead scorpions
•four live, stingless scorpions
•an equivalent mass of hard-boiled egg (control)
•6 tests: pup trained on live scorpions was the only successful handler, or had fastest handling time.
•All dead scorpion and control pups were pincered or pseudo-stung (only occurred once for live scorpion trained pups)
