Living in an uncertain world: innovate or imitate?

Dr. S.M. Reader

Results 2006

Our project joins human scientists, with an interest in business innovation, with behavioural
biologists, who study animal social learning and cognitive evolution. We will employ experimental studies of humans combined with fish behavioural studies that go beyond that possible in humans to address developmental and evolved changes in information gathering strategies. We thus foster the adoption of evolutionary approaches within human sciences, promote active collaboration, and hope to provide insights into the evolutionary basis of human behaviour.

The project began recently, and our research plan matches our proposal closely. In the first half of 2007 we hope to have completed our pilot studies, and have fully developed protocols to examine information gathering strategies. We will then proceed with examining the role of environmental variability on information gathering strategy and in establishing fish selection lines.

At this early stage, results are limited as our focus has been on developing new paradigms and protocols. Specifically, we have conducted three pilot studies in guppies on social learning. We have developed a ‘virtual maze’ paradigm in humans and completed a pilot study and human work begun in preparation for this programme. Our principal findings are:
1. Humans attend to and acquire social information presented in real-world following problems, and use this information to navigate in unfamiliar surroundings. This supports our use of a virtual maze paradigm.
2. The pilot virtual maze study demonstrated rapid learning of reward locations, and we observed differences in the tendencies to utilise social versus personal information that appeared to change with environmental variability.
3. Guppies can remember a preferred shoal location, a subsidiary finding made while investigating social learning paradigms.

We have become increasingly interested in the precise role social information plays in mathematical models of the evolution of social learning, in particular variation in demonstrator quality and the possibility of sampling from multiple individuals.

We study two model systems (fish and humans) to explicitly address issues of generality. We hope to shed light on general decision making processes that influence the choice between information gathering strategies that apply to both animals and humans.