Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Treliever Road, Penryn, Cornwall, UK.
School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Tyndall Avenue, Bristol, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2023 Aug 9;290(2004):20230705. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0705.
Animal cultures have now been demonstrated experimentally in diverse taxa from flies to great apes. However, experiments commonly use tasks with unrestricted access to equal pay-offs and innovations seeded by demonstrators who are trained to exhibit strong preferences. Such conditions may not reflect those typically found in nature. For example, the learned preferences of natural innovators may be weaker, while competition for depleting resources can favour switching between strategies and generalizing from past experience. Here we show that in experiments where wild jackdaws () can freely discover depleting supplies of novel foods, generalization has a powerful effect on learning, allowing individuals to exploit multiple new opportunities through both social and individual learning. Further, in contrast to studies with trained demonstrators, individuals that were first to innovate showed weak preferences. As a consequence, many individuals ate all available novel foods, displaying no strong preference and no group-level culture emerged. Individuals followed a 'learn from adults' strategy, but other demographic factors played a minimal role in shaping social transmission. These results demonstrate the importance of generalization in allowing animals to exploit new opportunities and highlight how natural competitive dynamics may impede the formation of culture.
动物文化现已在从苍蝇到大型猿类等多种分类单元中通过实验得到证实。然而，实验通常使用不受限制地获得同等收益的任务，以及由经过强化偏好展示训练的示范者引入的创新。这些条件可能无法反映自然界中通常存在的情况。例如，自然创新者的习得偏好可能较弱，而对消耗性资源的竞争则有利于在策略之间切换，并从过去的经验中进行概括。在这里，我们表明，在实验中，野生松鸦（）可以自由发现新型食物的消耗性供应，概括对学习有强大的影响，允许个体通过社会和个体学习来利用多种新机会。此外，与经过训练的示范者的研究相比，首先创新的个体表现出较弱的偏好。因此，许多个体吃了所有可用的新型食物，没有表现出强烈的偏好，也没有出现群体层面的文化。个体遵循“向成年人学习”的策略，但其他人口统计学因素在塑造社会传播方面的作用微不足道。这些结果表明概括在允许动物利用新机会方面的重要性，并强调了自然竞争动态如何阻碍文化的形成。
