Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity.

ABSTRACT: The extent to which animal societies exhibit social conformity as opposed to behavioural diversity is commonly attributed to adaptive learning strategies. Less attention is given to the possibility that the relative difficulty of learning a task socially as opposed to individually can be critical for social learning dynamics. Here we show that by raising initial task difficulty, house sparrows previously shown to exhibit adaptive social diversity become predominantly conformists. The task we used required opening feeding well covers (easier to learn socially) and to choose the covers with the rewarding cues (easy to learn individually). We replicated a previous study where sparrows exhibited adaptive diversity, but did not pre-train the naive sparrows to open covers, making the task initia

SUBMITTER: Markovic Đ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10320340 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature