Abstract
From ants to zebras, animals are influenced by the behavior of others. At the simplest level, social support can reduce neophobia, increasing animals’ exploration of novel spaces, foods, and other environmental stimuli. Animals can also learn new skills more quickly and more readily after observing others perform them. How then can we apply animals’ proclivity to socially learn to enhance their care and welfare in captive settings? Here, I review the ways in which animals (selectively) use social information, and propose tactics for leveraging that to refine the behavioral management of captive animals: to enhance socialization techniques, enrichment strategies, and training outcomes. It is also important to consider, however, that social learning does not always promote the uniform expression of new behaviors. There are differences in animals’ likelihood to seek out or use socially provided information, driven by characteristics such as species, rank, age, and personality. Additionally, social learning can result in inexact transmission or the transmission of undesirable behaviors. Thus, understanding when, how, and why animals use social information is key to developing effective strategies to improve how we care for animals across settings and, ultimately, enhance captive animal welfare.
Highlights
From ants to zebras, animals are influenced by the behavior of others
While learning clearly confers benefits to wild animals, what about for captive animals whose environments are less variable and more predictable? Animals do not stop learning or responding to their environment because they are housed in captive settings [3], and animals’ proclivity to learn can be leveraged to enhance behavioral management practices [4]
When the prawns were tested in small social groups, size no longer predicted learning success; instead, the prawns’ state of hunger mediated their proficiency, likely due to increased motivation to outcompete group mates. Such patterns are not isolated, but they underscore that, when studying animal learning, we must take into account a number of different factors about the animal and their environment, and in this article I focus on the social environment
Summary
In the mid-to-late 19th Century, researchers began to methodically and experimentally study how animals learn [14,15,16]. A recent meta-analysis of research on animal’s innovative behavior across taxa revealed some consistent patterns that predicted animals’ likelihood to innovate [20], including that larger and older, exploratory, or neophilic animals are typically more likely to innovate than juveniles or more neophobic individuals Such individual differences are important to consider when planning ways in which learning theory can be applied to setting training goals (e.g., [21,22]) as well as refining behavioral management practices more generally [23]. When the prawns were tested in small social groups, size no longer predicted learning success; instead, the prawns’ state of hunger mediated their proficiency, likely due to increased motivation to outcompete group mates Such patterns are not isolated, but they underscore that, when studying animal learning, we must take into account a number of different factors about the animal and their environment, and in this article I focus on the social environment. I discuss how the social landscape mediates animals’ learning
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