On the interface of genetic, cultural and ecological dynamics: social learning and the emergence of foraging cultures

Results 2004

Progress

This project has now been underway for 17 months and is progressing well. Our baseline model is now well developed and has already lead to some interesting results. In particular, we have investigated how different resource distributions in a resource rich spatial environment, affect the diets of primate-like entities which have to learn what to eat. As a baseline we only investigated individual learning.
The results we obtained were very interesting. In homogenous environments, learning in groups tended to result in individualistic less-overlapping diets. However, in patchy environments, we found that an interaction between grouping and patches resulted in a socialisation of individual learning. This lead to group-level diets as would be expected for social learning. In addition, different groups in the same environment tend to develop different group-level diets. The fascinating point here is that, although most evolutionary studies on social learning tend to focus on the adaptive value of social lea rning, our results suggest that if patches and grouping interact, a socialisation of individual learning will automatically arise whether it is adaptive or not. Given that most species live in patchy environments, we feel that this has large implications for how we view social learning. These results were presented and published as preliminary results in the ACRI 2004 conference proceedings.
We have continued work on how resource distributions affect diet development through individual learning. We have further investigated the homogenous and patchy cases and more intermediate resource distributions. In addition, we have investigated the heritability of differing diets developed in different groups in the same environment. Here we found a very high fidelity of inheritance, suggesting that socialised individual learning could lead to dietary traditions. These and earlier results were presented at the annual Nederlandse Vereniging voor Gedragsbiologie meeting in Dalfsen (2004).