The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered Through the Prism of Social Learning

Abstract

Learning, through the Baldwin effect, has showed to successfully guide evolutionary process in a number of research. More interestingly, learning can be classified into two categories. The first one is asocial (individual) learning when learners learn by directly interacting with their environment, e.g. trial-and-error. The other is social learning when learners learn from others, e.g. imitation learning. There has been a large body of research on this topic concerning the former. Drawing on a rich literature concerning social learning in animals, this paper reconsiders the Baldwin effect under the eye of social learning. The paper provides an introduction of social learning and related concepts. We also propose our own algorithm combining evolution and social learning and test on a compact simulation. The results obtained are encouraging and indicative. Social learning in combination with asocial learning has showed to be useful to guide the evolutionary search. Experimental results also indicate that social learning makes the Baldwin effect happens more quickly, as well as increase the average fitness of the population. The level of information fidelity is also investigated with respect to its influence on the effect of social learning by a series of comparative experiments. The relationship between social learning and asocial learning in nature is also discussed as an indication for future works.