Greggor Alison L, Thornton Alex, Clayton Nicola S
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH USA.
Behav Ecol Sociobiol. 2017;71(1):16. doi: 10.1007/s00265-016-2238-4. Epub 2016 Dec 7.
Social learning can influence how animals respond to anthropogenic changes in the environment, determining whether animals survive novel threats and exploit novel resources or produce maladaptive behaviour and contribute to human-wildlife conflict. Predicting where social learning will occur and manipulating its use are, therefore, important in conservation, but doing so is not straightforward. Learning is an inherently biased process that has been shaped by natural selection to prioritize important information and facilitate its efficient uptake. In this regard, social learning is no different from other learning processes because it too is shaped by perceptual filters, attentional biases and learning constraints that can differ between habitats, species, individuals and contexts. The biases that constrain social learning are not understood well enough to accurately predict whether or not social learning will occur in many situations, which limits the effective use of social learning in conservation practice. Nevertheless, we argue that by tapping into the biases that guide the social transmission of information, the conservation applications of social learning could be improved. We explore the conservation areas where social learning is highly relevant and link them to biases in the cues and contexts that shape social information use. The resulting synthesis highlights many promising areas for collaboration between the fields and stresses the importance of systematic reviews of the evidence surrounding social learning practices.
社会学习会影响动物如何应对环境中的人为变化，决定动物能否在新的威胁中生存、利用新资源，还是会产生适应不良行为并导致人类与野生动物的冲突。因此，预测社会学习将在何处发生并操控其运用，对保护工作而言至关重要，但要做到这一点并不简单。学习是一个本质上有偏向性的过程，它是由自然选择塑造的，以优先处理重要信息并促进其有效吸收。在这方面，社会学习与其他学习过程并无不同，因为它同样受到感知过滤器、注意力偏向和学习限制的影响，而这些在不同的栖息地、物种、个体和情境中可能会有所不同。在许多情况下，限制社会学习的偏向尚未得到充分理解，无法准确预测社会学习是否会发生，这限制了社会学习在保护实践中的有效应用。尽管如此，我们认为，通过利用引导信息社会传播的偏向，可以改进社会学习在保护方面的应用。我们探索了社会学习高度相关的保护领域，并将它们与塑造社会信息使用的线索和情境中的偏向联系起来。由此得出的综合结论突出了该领域之间许多有前景的合作领域，并强调了对围绕社会学习实践的证据进行系统综述的重要性。
