Leadbeater Ellouise, Dawson Erika H
School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham TW20 0EX, United Kingdom;
Laboratoire Evolution, Génomes, Comportement et Ecologie, CNRS, 91198 Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7838-7845. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620744114. Epub 2017 Jul 24.
The social world offers a wealth of opportunities to learn from others, and across the animal kingdom individuals capitalize on those opportunities. Here, we explore the role of natural selection in shaping the processes that underlie social information use, using a suite of experiments on social insects as case studies. We illustrate how an associative framework can encompass complex, context-specific social learning in the insect world and beyond, and based on the hypothesis that evolution acts to modify the associative process, suggest potential pathways by which social information use could evolve to become more efficient and effective. Social insects are distant relatives of vertebrate social learners, but the research we describe highlights routes by which natural selection could coopt similar cognitive raw material across the animal kingdom.
社会世界提供了丰富的向他人学习的机会，在整个动物界，个体都会利用这些机会。在这里，我们以社会性昆虫的一系列实验为案例研究，探讨自然选择在塑造社会信息利用背后的过程中所起的作用。我们说明了一个联想框架如何能够涵盖昆虫世界及其他领域中复杂的、特定情境的社会学习，并基于进化作用于修改联想过程这一假设，提出社会信息利用可能进化得更高效的潜在途径。社会性昆虫是脊椎动物社会学习者的远亲，但我们所描述的研究突出了自然选择在整个动物界利用相似认知原材料的途径。
