VIII. The wisdom by social learning

Several Horses and Mares of Quality in the Neighbourhood came often to our House upon the Report spread of a wonderful Yahoo that could speak like a Houyhnhnm, and seemed in his Words and Actions to discover some Glimmerings of Reason. These delighted to converse with me; they put many Questions, and received such Answers, as I was able to return. By all these Advantages, I made so great a Progress, that in five Months from my arrival, I understood whatever was speaking, and could express myself tolerably well.

Gulliver's Travels. The Wisdom of the Houyhnhnms.

By Jonathan Swift.

Members of many species spend a great part of their time in the company of conspecifics. Animals can assimilate essential information by observing their companions, that is, when, where and what to eat, with whom to mate, whom to fear, and how to spend spare time if there is some. In principle, as we have seen from Part VII, all information can be picked up from internal resources by development of inherited program. However, social learning and communication give animals great possibilities to improve adaptability and flexibility of behaviour in conformity with concrete and changeable vital circumstances. In many natural situations boundaries between flexibility and conservatism are rather fuzzy. Social learning can sometimes generate behavioural traditions, and some of these traditions can be paradoxically conservative and thus hardly distinguishable from innate forms of behaviour by displays. If we want to know what part of a whole repertoire falls to the share of social learning, we definitely can not gain this knowledge in the mind's eye; instead, we should conduct developmental studies and carry out special experiments.

Previous parts of the book were devoted to investigations of the role of individual experience and inherited behavioural programs in animal life. In this part we advert to the role of social learning. In modern ethology and comparative psychology studying of social learning is a specific and rapidly developing direction with its own notions, definitions and hypotheses. We will consider different forms of social learning, from relatively simple such as social facilitation, to the most complex such as tutoring and maintaining traditions in animal societies. In general, we will develop a concept of how animals acquire information and skills from other individuals by means of observations on their behaviour.

25. ECOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF SOCIAL LEARNING

Social learning is said to occur when direct or indirect social interaction facilitates the acquisition of a novel pattern of behaviour. It usually takes the form of an experienced animal (the demonstrator) performing behaviour such that a naive animal (the observer) subsequently expresses the same novel behaviour sooner or more completely that it would have done using individual learning.

Social learning in modern reviews (see, for example: Zentall and Akins, 2001; Caldwell and Whiten, 2002) refers to any situation in which the behaviour, or presence, or the products of the behaviour, of one individual influence the learning of another.