6 Marijn van Wingerden, Jochen Hoog and Sander van Gurp were supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung Freigeist fellowship, 7 AZ88216 8 Abstract 9Many species, including humans, are sensitive to social signals and their valuation is important in social learning. 10When social cues indicate that another is experiencing reward, they could convey vicarious reward value and 11 prompt social learning. Here, we introduce a task that investigates if vicarious reward delivery in male rats can 12 drive reinforcement learning in a formal associative learning paradigm. Using the blocking/unblocking paradigm, 13we found that when actor rats have fully learned a stimulus-self reward association, adding a cue that predicted 14 additional partner reward unblocked associative learning about this cue. In contrast, additional cues that did not 15 predict partner reward remained blocked from acquiring associative value. Preventing social signal exchange 16 between the partners resulted in cues signaling partner reward remaining blocked. Taken together, these 17 results suggest that vicarious rewards can drive reinforcement learning in rats, and that the transmission of 18 social cues is necessary for this learning to occur. 24prompting questions why actor engage in them (de Waal and Suchak

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Many species, including rats, are sensitive to social signals and their valuation is important in social learning. Here we introduce a task that investigates if mutual reward delivery in male rats can drive associative learning. We found that when actor rats have fully learned a stimulus-self-reward association, adding a cue that predicted additional reward to a partner unblocked associative learning about this cue. By contrast, additional cues that did not predict partner reward remained blocked from acquiring positive associative value. Importantly, this social unblocking effect was still present when controlling for secondary reinforcement but absent when social information exchange was impeded, when mutual reward outcomes were disadvantageously unequal to the actor or when the added cue predicted reward delivery to an empty chamber. Taken together, these results suggest that mutual rewards can drive associative learning in rats and is dependent on vicariously experienced social and food-related cues.

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