The influence of task difficulty, social tolerance and model success on social learning in Barbary macaques.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Garcia-Nisa I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9860066 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature