Abstract
In the social transmission of food preference paradigm, naive observer rats acquire safety information about novel food sources in the environment through social interaction with a demonstrator rat that has recently eaten said food. Research into the behavioural mechanisms governing this form of learning has found that observers show increased reliance on socially acquired information when the state of the environment makes personal examination of their surroundings risky. We aimed to (1) determine whether reliance on social information would decrease if previous reliance on social learning was unsuccessful, and (2) whether reliance on the specific demonstrator that had transmitted poor information would similarly decrease. By inducing illness in observers following consumption of a socially demonstrated food, we created an environmental situation in which reliance on socially acquired information was maladaptive. We found that under these conditions, observers showed no change in their reliance on a specific demonstrator or socially learned information in general. Our experiment also unexpectedly produced results showing that recent demonstrators were more influential in later transmissions than demonstrators that had been learned from less recently. Notably, this effect only emerged when the observer simultaneously interacted with both demonstrators, indicating that demonstrators must be in direct competition for this effect to manifest.
Highlights
For all animals, the ability to learn about and adapt to their surroundings is an essential component of survival
One of the most frequently studied forms of social learning is the social transmission of food preference (STFP), a social adaption exhibited by a number of rodent species that allows them to learn about food sources in the environment through interaction with conspecifics
A number of predictions about the effect that the characteristics of the observer/environment might have on reliance on social versus asocial learning have been experimentally confirmed in the STFP model [10,11,12,13], possibly implying that information acquired via STFP may be encoded in such a way that it is ‘tagged’ as being socially acquired
Summary
The ability to learn about and adapt to their surroundings is an essential component of survival. As acquisition of an STFP is pheromone mediated [4] and in no way requires that the observer attend to or interpret the behaviour of its demonstrator, it is entirely possible that the transfer of information occurs without the observer’s conscious awareness This idea is further supported by past research which has found that is the presence of a conspecific in no way necessary for an STFP to be acquired as long as the observer is exposed to CS2 in combination with a novel scent [1,4], but that observers are capable of acquiring an STFP of equal strength to that acquired by awake controls while under anaesthesia [22]. To optimize the ability of subsequent experiments to pick up on small changes in preference, we tested both high and low interaction times between observers and demonstrators
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