What's social about social learning?

Abstract

Research on social learning in animals has revealed a rich variety of cases where animals--from caddis fly larvae to chimpanzees--acquire biologically important information by observing the actions of others. A great deal is known about the adaptive functions of social learning, but very little about the cognitive mechanisms that make it possible. Even in the case of imitation, a type of social learning studied in both comparative psychology and cognitive science, there has been minimal contact between the two disciplines. Social learning has been isolated from cognitive science by two longstanding assumptions: that it depends on a set of special-purpose modules--cognitive adaptations for social living; and that these learning mechanisms are largely distinct from the processes mediating human social cognition. Recent research challenges these assumptions by showing that social learning covaries with asocial learning; occurs in solitary animals; and exhibits the same features in diverse species, including humans. Drawing on this evidence, I argue that social and asocial learning depend on the same basic learning mechanisms; these are adapted for the detection of predictive relationships in all natural domains; and they are associative mechanisms--processes that encode information for long-term storage by forging excitatory and inhibitory links between event representations. Thus, human and nonhuman social learning are continuous, and social learning is adaptively specialized--it becomes distinctively "social"--only when input mechanisms (perceptual, attentional, and motivational processes) are phylogenetically or ontogenetically tuned to other agents.

Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies

“…Recent studies have shown that social learning in rats can be influenced by early developmental cues such as maternal care (Lindeyer et al 2013), and in bees by past learning histories (Dawson et al 2013). However, while similar processes may well operate in humans (Heyes 2012), it is difficult to explain the species differences in cumulative cultural evolution described above without positing some kind of genetic adaptation in the human lineage, perhaps involving the extent of imitation during childhood (Lyons et al 2007) or theory of mind (Tomasello et al 2005). …”

“…In the non-human literature, too, it has been argued that social learning can be explained in terms of simple associative learning mechanisms, rather than dedicated geneticallyspecified, domain-specific mechanisms (Heyes 2012;Heyes and Pearce 2015;Leadbeater 2015). Recent studies have shown that social learning in rats can be influenced by early developmental cues such as maternal care (Lindeyer et al 2013), and in bees by past learning histories (Dawson et al 2013).…”

Explaining brain size variation: from social to cultural brain

“…It is also a much faster and much more reliable way of acquiring solutions than asocial exploration and learning, making it an energetically vastly more efficient use of expensive brain tissue. Finally, selection on more effective techniques of social learning also automatically improves the asocial learning ability because of the high cognitive overlap between the two [56]. This overlap also ensures correlated evolution between innovative and social-learning abilities.…”

Not-so-social learning strategies

“…These principles have been used with great success to account for the phenomena of asocial learning [4], and can account for many aspects of social learning [5,6]. Moreover, the formal manner in which the principles have been presented means that it is possible to derive clear predictions from them concerning the various SLSs considered below.…”

“…Taxonomies of this kind typically delineated social learning effects, not social learning mechanisms; they focused on the behavioural products of social learning, but were silent about the psychological (and neurological) processes yielding these outcomes [5].…”