Movement and conformity interact to establish local behavioural traditions in animal populations.

ABSTRACT: The social transmission of information is critical to the emergence of animal culture. Two processes are predicted to play key roles in how socially-transmitted information spreads in animal populations: the movement of individuals across the landscape and conformist social learning. We develop a model that, for the first time, explicitly integrates these processes to investigate their impacts on the spread of behavioural preferences. Our results reveal a strong interplay between movement and conformity in determining whether locally-variable traditions establish across a landscape or whether a single preference dominates the whole population. The model is able to replicate a real-world cultural diffusion experiment in great tits Parus major, but also allows for a range of predictions for

SUBMITTER: Somveille M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6319775 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature