Easter, C orcid.org/0000-0001-8538-2076, Rowlands, A, Hassall, C orcid.org/0000-0002-3510-0728 et al. (1 more author) (2022) Aggression-based social learning in the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata). Ethology. ISSN 0179-1613
Abstract
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Authors. Ethology published by Wiley-VCH GmbH. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | aggressive, directed social learning, Network-Based Diffusion Analysis, personality, relationships, social learning strategies |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 04 Jan 2022 15:42 |
Last Modified: | 14 Apr 2022 00:43 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/eth.13260 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:181758 |