Learning by proportional observation in a species of fish

Thomas W. Pike, Jeremy R. Kendal, Luke E. Rendell and Kevin N. Laland

Behavioral Ecology, 2010, vol. 21, issue 3, 570-575

Abstract: Theoretical analyses predict that animals should not copy other individuals indiscriminately but rather should do so selectively, according to evolved behavioral strategies that dictate the circumstances under which they copy. Here, we show experimentally that nine-spined sticklebacks (Pungitius pungitius) use social information in accordance with 1 of 3 theoretically predicted optimal strategies to guide their foraging behavior. Under test, sticklebacks copied the foraging patch choice of demonstrator individuals with a probability proportional to the demonstrators' payoff. The observation of this highly efficient form of learning in a species of fish supports the view that the presence of enhanced social learning may be better predicted by specific sources of selection than by how closely the species is related to humans and sheds light on the character of an adaptive specialization in stickleback learning. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arq025 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:21:y:2010:i:3:p:570-575

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().