Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Bute Medical Building, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9TS, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2012 Feb 22;279(1729):653-62. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1172. Epub 2011 Jul 27.
Humans are characterized by an extreme dependence on culturally transmitted information. Such dependence requires the complex integration of social and asocial information to generate effective learning and decision making. Recent formal theory predicts that natural selection should favour adaptive learning strategies, but relevant empirical work is scarce and rarely examines multiple strategies or tasks. We tested nine hypotheses derived from theoretical models, running a series of experiments investigating factors affecting when and how humans use social information, and whether such behaviour is adaptive, across several computer-based tasks. The number of demonstrators, consensus among demonstrators, confidence of subjects, task difficulty, number of sessions, cost of asocial learning, subject performance and demonstrator performance all influenced subjects' use of social information, and did so adaptively. Our analysis provides strong support for the hypothesis that human social learning is regulated by adaptive learning rules.
人类的特点是极度依赖文化传递的信息。这种依赖性需要复杂地整合社会信息和非社会信息，以产生有效的学习和决策。最近的理论预测，自然选择应该有利于适应性学习策略，但相关的实证工作很少，而且很少同时考察多种策略或任务。我们通过一系列实验检验了九个基于理论模型的假设，这些实验研究了影响人类何时以及如何使用社会信息的因素，以及这种行为是否具有适应性，涉及多项基于计算机的任务。示范者的数量、示范者之间的一致性、主体的信心、任务难度、会话次数、非社会学习的成本、主体的表现和示范者的表现都影响了主体对社会信息的使用，而且这种影响是适应性的。我们的分析为人类社会学习受适应性学习规则调节的假设提供了强有力的支持。
