Social foraging: individual learning and cultural transmission of innovations

Abstract

We present two stochastic models of individual and social learning that count the number of individuals exhibiting a learned, resource-producing trait in a group of social foragers. The novelty of our modeling results from incorporating the empirically based assumption that rates of both individual and social learning should depend on the frequency of the learned trait within the group. When resources occur as clumps shared by group members, a naive individual's acquisition of the skill required for clump discovery/production should involve opposing processes of frequency dependence. The opportunity to learn via cultural transmission should increase with the trait's frequency, but the opportunity for learning individually should decrease as the trait's frequency increases. The results of the model suggest that the evolution of the capacity for cultural transmission may be promoted in environments where scrounging at resource clumps inhibits rates of individual learning.