Kar Fonti, Whiting Martin J, Noble Daniel W A
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia.
Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW, 2052, Australia.
Anim Cogn. 2017 Sep;20(5):805-812. doi: 10.1007/s10071-017-1101-y. Epub 2017 Jun 2.
There is mounting evidence that social learning is not just restricted to group-living animals, but also occurs in species with a wide range of social systems. However, we still have a poor understanding of the factors driving individual differences in social information use. We investigated the effects of relative dominance on social information use in the eastern water skink (Eulamprus quoyii), a species with age-dependent social learning. We used staged contests to establish dominant-subordinate relationships in pairs of lizards and tested whether observers use social information to more quickly solve both an association and reversal learning task in situations where the demonstrator was either dominant or subordinate. Surprisingly, we found no evidence of social information use, irrespective of relative dominance between observer and demonstrator. However, dominant lizards learnt at a faster rate than subordinate lizards in the associative learning task, although there were no significant differences in the reversal task. In light of previous work in this species, we suggest that age may be a more important driver of social information use because demonstrators and observers in our study were closely size-matched and were likely to be of similar age.
越来越多的证据表明，社会学习不仅限于群居动物，也发生在具有广泛社会系统的物种中。然而，我们对驱动社会信息使用中个体差异的因素仍知之甚少。我们研究了相对优势对东部水滑蜥（Eulamprus quoyii）社会信息使用的影响，这是一种具有年龄依赖性社会学习的物种。我们通过 staged contests 建立蜥蜴对之间的优势-从属关系，并测试观察者是否在示范者为主导或从属的情况下使用社会信息来更快地解决关联学习和反转学习任务。令人惊讶的是，无论观察者和示范者之间的相对优势如何，我们都没有发现社会信息使用的证据。然而，在关联学习任务中，优势蜥蜴比从属蜥蜴学习速度更快，尽管在反转任务中没有显著差异。鉴于该物种以前的研究工作，我们认为年龄可能是社会信息使用的更重要驱动因素，因为我们研究中的示范者和观察者在大小上密切匹配，并且可能年龄相似。
