Lind Johan, Ghirlanda Stefano, Enquist Magnus
Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution and Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College of CUNY, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2019 Mar 13;6(3):181777. doi: 10.1098/rsos.181777. eCollection 2019 Mar.
Social transmission of information is a key phenomenon in the evolution of behaviour and in the establishment of traditions and culture. The diversity of social learning phenomena has engendered a diverse terminology and numerous ideas about underlying learning mechanisms, at the same time that some researchers have called for a unitary analysis of social learning in terms of associative processes. Leveraging previous attempts and a recent computational formulation of associative learning, we analyse the following learning scenarios in some generality: learning responses to social stimuli, including learning to imitate; learning responses to non-social stimuli; learning sequences of actions; learning to avoid danger. We conceptualize social learning as situations in which stimuli that arise from other individuals have an important role in learning. This role is supported by genetic predispositions that either cause responses to social stimuli or enable social stimuli to reinforce specific responses. Simulations were performed using a new learning simulator program. The simulator is publicly available and can be used for further theoretical investigations and to guide empirical research of learning and behaviour. Our explorations show that, when guided by genetic predispositions, associative processes can give rise to a wide variety of social learning phenomena, such as stimulus and local enhancement, contextual imitation and simple production imitation, observational conditioning, and social and response facilitation. In addition, we clarify how associative mechanisms can result in transfer of information and behaviour from experienced to naive individuals.
信息的社会传播是行为进化以及传统和文化形成过程中的关键现象。社会学习现象的多样性催生了多样的术语以及众多关于潜在学习机制的观点，与此同时，一些研究人员呼吁从联想过程的角度对社会学习进行统一分析。借助先前的研究尝试以及近期关于联想学习的计算模型，我们对以下几种学习场景进行了较为全面的分析：对社会刺激的学习反应，包括学习模仿；对非社会刺激的学习反应；动作序列的学习；学习规避危险。我们将社会学习概念化为这样的情形，即源自其他个体的刺激在学习中发挥着重要作用。这种作用得到了遗传倾向的支持，这些遗传倾向要么引发对社会刺激的反应，要么使社会刺激能够强化特定反应。我们使用一个新的学习模拟器程序进行了模拟。该模拟器已公开可用，可用于进一步的理论研究以及指导学习与行为的实证研究。我们的探索表明，在遗传倾向的引导下，联想过程能够引发各种各样的社会学习现象，如刺激增强和局部增强、情境模仿和简单的生产性模仿、观察性条件作用，以及社会促进和反应促进。此外，我们还阐明了联想机制如何导致信息和行为从有经验的个体传递给无经验的个体。
