Centre for Social Learning and Cognitive Evolution, School of Biology, University of St Andrews, Queen's Terrace, St Andrews KY16 9TS, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2012 Oct 22;279(1745):4272-8. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1462. Epub 2012 Aug 15.
Social networks can result in directed social transmission of learned information, thus influencing how innovations spread through populations. Here we presented shoals of threespine sticklebacks (Gasterosteous aculeatus) with two identical foraging tasks and applied network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) to determine whether the order in which individuals in a social group contacted and solved the tasks was affected by the group's network structure. We found strong evidence for a social effect on discovery of the foraging tasks with individuals tending to discover a task sooner when others in their group had previously done so, and with the spread of discovery of the foraging tasks influenced by groups' social networks. However, the same patterns of association did not reliably predict spread of solution to the tasks, suggesting that social interactions affected the time at which the tasks were discovered, but not the latency to its solution following discovery. The present analysis, one of the first applications of NBDA to a natural animal system, illustrates how NBDA can lead to insight into the mechanisms supporting behaviour acquisition that more conventional statistical approaches might miss. Importantly, we provide the first compelling evidence that the spread of novel behaviours can result from social learning in the absence of social transmission, a phenomenon that we refer to as an untransmitted social effect on learning.
社交网络可以导致习得信息的定向社交传播，从而影响创新在人群中的传播方式。在这里，我们给三组三刺鱼（Gasterosteous aculeatus）展示了两个相同的觅食任务，并应用基于网络的扩散分析（NBDA）来确定社交群体中个体接触和解决任务的顺序是否受到群体网络结构的影响。我们发现，个体在群体中的其他成员之前已经完成任务时，会更倾向于更早地发现任务，而且群体的社交网络会影响发现任务的扩散，这表明社会效应强烈影响了觅食任务的发现。然而，同样的关联模式并不能可靠地预测解决任务的传播，这表明社交互动影响了任务被发现的时间，但不能影响发现后解决任务的潜伏期。本分析是 NBDA 在自然动物系统中的首次应用之一，说明了 NBDA 如何能够深入了解支持行为习得的机制，而传统的统计方法可能会忽略这些机制。重要的是，我们提供了第一个令人信服的证据，表明在没有社会传播的情况下，新行为的传播可以来自社会学习，我们将这种现象称为学习的未传递社会效应。
