Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect.

ABSTRACT: Social insects make elaborate use of simple mechanisms to achieve seemingly complex behavior and may thus provide a unique resource to discover the basic cognitive elements required for culture, i.e., group-specific behaviors that spread from "innovators" to others in the group via social learning. We first explored whether bumblebees can learn a nonnatural object manipulation task by using string pulling to access a reward that was presented out of reach. Only a small minority "innovated" and solved the task spontaneously, but most bees were able to learn to pull a string when trained in a stepwise manner. In addition, naïve bees learnt the task by observing a trained demonstrator from a distance. Learning the behavior relied on a combination of simple associative mechanisms and trial-and

SUBMITTER: Alem S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5049772 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature