Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 30, Pages 7838-7845Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620744114
Keywords
social learning; associative learning; observational conditioning; social insects; Bombus
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council Starting Grant BeeDanceGap
- Early Career Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust
- Fyssen foundation postdoctoral fellowship
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The social world offers a wealth of opportunities to learn from others, and across the animal kingdom individuals capitalize on those opportunities. Here, we explore the role of natural selection in shaping the processes that underlie social information use, using a suite of experiments on social insects as case studies. We illustrate how an associative framework can encompass complex, context-specific social learning in the insect world and beyond, and based on the hypothesis that evolution acts to modify the associative process, suggest potential pathways by which social information use could evolve to become more efficient and effective. Social insects are distant relatives of vertebrate social learners, but the research we describe highlights routes by which natural selection could coopt similar cognitive raw material across the animal kingdom.
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