Aggression-based social learning in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata)

Selectively learning from specific types of individuals may be adaptive if demonstrator characteristics can be used to identify more beneficial sources of social information. Such “social learning biases” have been experimentally demonstrated in a number of species, but these experiments generally involve restricted laboratory conditions using a limited number of potential demonstrators and tend to consider only the characteristics of demonstrators rather than the importance of pairwise relationships on information transfer between individuals. In this study, we presented a novel foraging task to a large population of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) housed in a free-flying aviary and used multinetwork Network-Based Diffusion Analysis (NBDA) to establish whether birds learned from individuals they shared particular relationships with. Specifically, we investigated whether task solves followed social learning pathways representing the following relationships between individuals: feeding associations, aggressive interactions, positive associations (e.g. grooming) and mating pairs. We found strong evidence that zebra finches learn from their aggressors, irrespective of the outcome of that aggressive encounter. This has been previously suggested in laboratory-based studies on zebra finches, but never conclusively documented in a freely interacting population. We also found some weaker evidence to suggest that zebra finches learn from their mates—a social learning bias that has previously received little to no attention. However, we found that mates-based learning occurred infrequently and was secondary to aggression-based social learning biases. Our results therefore additionally highlight the importance of including combinations of multiple potential information pathways in social learning analyses to account for secondary learning pathways that may otherwise be missed.