Social behavior mediates the use of social and personal information in wild jays

Jonathon J Valente,Renee R Ha,Sang-Im Lee,Kelsey B Mccune,Piotr G Jablonski

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-06496-x

Abstract

The factors favoring the evolution of certain cognitive abilities in animals remain unclear. Social learning is a cognitive ability that reduces the cost of acquiring personal information and forms the foundation for cultural behavior. Theory predicts the evolutionary pressures to evolve social learning should be greater in more social species. However, research testing this theory has primarily occurred in captivity, where artificial environments can affect performance and yield conflicting results. We compared the use of social and personal information, and the social learning mechanisms used by wild, asocial California scrub-jays and social Mexican jays. We trained demonstrators to solve one door on a multi-door task, then measured the behavior of naïve conspecifics towards the task. If social learning occurs, observations of demonstrators will change the rate that naïve individuals interact with each door. We found both species socially learned, though personal information had a much greater effect on behavior in the asocial species while social information was more important for the social species. Additionally, both species used social information to avoid, rather than copy, conspecifics. Our findings demonstrate that while complex social group structures may be unnecessary for the evolution of social learning, it does affect the use of social versus personal information.

Highlights

IntroductionAsocial species, which inconsistently occur in groups, may lack the motivation or perceptual ability to attend to and remember the behavior of others when it results in a cost to personal foraging s uccess[10,24]
Simultaneously acquire personal foraging information[23]
There was no significant difference in the number of times that a MEJA or CASJ demonstrator opened the door type that it was trained on (CASJ mean ± standard error = 110.2 ± 33.3, MEJA = 75 ± 36.0; W = 16, p = 0.53), or in the number of times that naïve individuals of each species observed a demonstrator open a door type (CASJ = 8.68 ± 1.6, MEJA = 10.04 ± 1.6; W = 229.5, p = 0.60)

Summary

Introduction

Asocial species, which inconsistently occur in groups, may lack the motivation or perceptual ability to attend to and remember the behavior of others when it results in a cost to personal foraging s uccess[10,24] It is unclear if individuals can choose between social and personal information if both are available and how that relates to their evolved social niche. Additional learning mechanisms that are thought to be less cognitively demanding are stimulus and local enhancement, where a naïve individual uses social information about, respectively, a specific stimulus (i.e. a tool, a color) or location (i.e. hole in the ground, branch on a tree) to access a new food s ource[25,26] These mechanisms can occur through associative learning where the actions of a conspecific become linked with a specific cue that predicts a reward[21]. If both species use social information, we predicted that the more social species will use the copying mechanisms of emulation or imitation while the asocial species will use cognitively simpler social learning mechanisms like social facilitation, stimulus, or local enhancement (Table 1, Fig. 1)

Methods

Results

Conclusion