Baldini Ryan
Graduate Group in Ecology, UC Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, United States.
Theor Popul Biol. 2013 Jun;86:43-9. doi: 10.1016/j.tpb.2013.03.005. Epub 2013 Apr 12.
I compare the evolutionary dynamics of two success-biased social learning strategies, which, by definition, use the success of others to inform one's social learning decisions. The first, "Compare Means", causes a learner to adopt cultural variants with highest mean payoff in her sample. The second, "Imitate the Best", causes a learner to imitate the single most successful individual in her sample. I summarize conditions under which each strategy performs well or poorly, and investigate their evolution via a gene-culture coevolutionary model. Despite the adaptive appeal of these strategies, both encounter conditions under which they systematically perform worse than simply imitating at random. Compare Means performs worst when the optimal cultural variant is usually at high frequency, while Imitate the Best performs worst when suboptimal variants sometimes produce high payoffs. The extent to which it is optimal to use success-biased social learning depends strongly on the payoff distributions and environmental conditions that human social learners face.
我比较了两种成功偏向型社会学习策略的进化动态，根据定义，这两种策略利用他人的成功来指导个人的社会学习决策。第一种是“比较均值”，它会使学习者采用其样本中平均收益最高的文化变体。第二种是“模仿最佳者”，它会使学习者模仿其样本中最成功的个体。我总结了每种策略表现良好或不佳的条件，并通过基因 - 文化共同进化模型研究它们的进化。尽管这些策略具有适应性吸引力，但它们都遇到了比随机模仿表现更差的情况。当最优文化变体通常处于高频时，“比较均值”表现最差；而当次优变体有时能产生高收益时，“模仿最佳者”表现最差。使用成功偏向型社会学习的最优程度在很大程度上取决于人类社会学习者所面临的收益分布和环境条件。
