Abstract
GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Psychol., 28 May 2012Sec. Comparative Psychology https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00165
Highlights
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (Figure 1A) has emerged as a key species for studying social learning in simple insect groups (Mery et al, 2009; Sarin and Dukas, 2009)
The authors investigated the mechanisms of social transmission and showed that social learning did not occur when observers were exposed to social cues only on one of the two media
The precise mechanism of social learning remains an open question, presumably, it can be explained by relatively simple associative learning processes occurring during physical contacts between observer and demonstrator flies through the perception of the olfactory cues carried by the demonstrators
Summary
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (Figure 1A) has emerged as a key species for studying social learning in simple insect groups (Mery et al, 2009; Sarin and Dukas, 2009). Writing in a recent issue of Current Biology, Battesti et al (2012) present evidence that Drosophila females use social information to select oviposition substrates, and that these socially acquired preferences can propagate and stabilize within groups, a phenomenon resembling cultural transmission of knowledge in vertebrates (Laland, 2008).
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