Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jan 20;13(1):1176. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-26699-6.
Despite playing a pivotal role in the inception of animal culture studies, macaque social learning is surprisingly understudied. Social learning is important to survival and influenced by dominance and affiliation in social animals. Individuals generally rely on social learning when individual learning is costly, and selectively use social learning strategies influencing what is learned and from whom. Here, we combined social learning experiments, using extractive foraging tasks, with network-based diffusion analysis (using various social relationships) to investigate the transmission of social information in free-ranging Barbary macaques. We also investigated the influence of task difficulty on reliance on social information and evidence for social learning strategies. Social learning was detected for the most difficult tasks only, with huddling relations outside task introductions, and observation networks during task introductions, predicting social transmission. For the most difficult task only, individuals appeared to employ a social learning strategy of copying the most successful demonstrator observed. Results indicate that high social tolerance represents social learning opportunities and influences social learning processes. The reliance of Barbary macaques on social learning, and cues of model-success supports the costly information hypothesis. Our study provides more statistical evidence to the previous claims indicative of culture in macaques.
尽管猕猴的社会学习在动物文化研究的起源中起着关键作用，但令人惊讶的是，对其研究却很少。社会学习对于生存很重要，并且受到社会动物中优势和从属关系的影响。当个体学习成本较高时，个体通常依赖于社会学习，并且有选择地使用社会学习策略来影响所学内容和学习对象。在这里，我们结合了使用提取觅食任务的社会学习实验，以及基于网络的扩散分析（使用各种社会关系），来调查自由放养的巴巴里猕猴中社会信息的传递。我们还研究了任务难度对依赖社会信息的影响，以及社会学习策略的证据。只有在最困难的任务中才检测到社会学习，在任务介绍之外的集群关系和任务介绍期间的观察网络可以预测社会传播。只有在最困难的任务中，个体似乎采用了一种社会学习策略，即复制观察到的最成功的示范者。结果表明，高社交容忍度代表了社会学习机会，并影响了社会学习过程。巴巴里猕猴对社会学习的依赖以及对模型成功的线索支持了昂贵信息假说。我们的研究为以前关于猕猴文化的说法提供了更多的统计证据。
