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Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws

Animal cultures have now been demonstrated experimentally in diverse taxa from flies to great apes. However, experiments commonly use tasks with unrestricted access to equal pay-offs and innovations seeded by demonstrators who are trained to exhibit strong preferences. Such conditions may not reflec...

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Autores principales: Arbon, Josh J., Hahn, Luca G., McIvor, Guillam E., Thornton, Alex
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10410225/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37554031
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.0705
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author Arbon, Josh J.
Hahn, Luca G.
McIvor, Guillam E.
Thornton, Alex
author_facet Arbon, Josh J.
Hahn, Luca G.
McIvor, Guillam E.
Thornton, Alex
author_sort Arbon, Josh J.
collection PubMed
description Animal cultures have now been demonstrated experimentally in diverse taxa from flies to great apes. However, experiments commonly use tasks with unrestricted access to equal pay-offs and innovations seeded by demonstrators who are trained to exhibit strong preferences. Such conditions may not reflect those typically found in nature. For example, the learned preferences of natural innovators may be weaker, while competition for depleting resources can favour switching between strategies and generalizing from past experience. Here we show that in experiments where wild jackdaws (Corvus monedula) can freely discover depleting supplies of novel foods, generalization has a powerful effect on learning, allowing individuals to exploit multiple new opportunities through both social and individual learning. Further, in contrast to studies with trained demonstrators, individuals that were first to innovate showed weak preferences. As a consequence, many individuals ate all available novel foods, displaying no strong preference and no group-level culture emerged. Individuals followed a ‘learn from adults’ strategy, but other demographic factors played a minimal role in shaping social transmission. These results demonstrate the importance of generalization in allowing animals to exploit new opportunities and highlight how natural competitive dynamics may impede the formation of culture.
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spelling pubmed-104102252023-08-10 Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws Arbon, Josh J. Hahn, Luca G. McIvor, Guillam E. Thornton, Alex Proc Biol Sci Behaviour Animal cultures have now been demonstrated experimentally in diverse taxa from flies to great apes. However, experiments commonly use tasks with unrestricted access to equal pay-offs and innovations seeded by demonstrators who are trained to exhibit strong preferences. Such conditions may not reflect those typically found in nature. For example, the learned preferences of natural innovators may be weaker, while competition for depleting resources can favour switching between strategies and generalizing from past experience. Here we show that in experiments where wild jackdaws (Corvus monedula) can freely discover depleting supplies of novel foods, generalization has a powerful effect on learning, allowing individuals to exploit multiple new opportunities through both social and individual learning. Further, in contrast to studies with trained demonstrators, individuals that were first to innovate showed weak preferences. As a consequence, many individuals ate all available novel foods, displaying no strong preference and no group-level culture emerged. Individuals followed a ‘learn from adults’ strategy, but other demographic factors played a minimal role in shaping social transmission. These results demonstrate the importance of generalization in allowing animals to exploit new opportunities and highlight how natural competitive dynamics may impede the formation of culture. The Royal Society 2023-08-09 2023-08-09 /pmc/articles/PMC10410225/ /pubmed/37554031 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.0705 Text en © 2023 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Behaviour
Arbon, Josh J.
Hahn, Luca G.
McIvor, Guillam E.
Thornton, Alex
Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title_full Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title_fullStr Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title_full_unstemmed Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title_short Competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
title_sort competition and generalization impede cultural formation in wild jackdaws
topic Behaviour
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10410225/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37554031
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.0705
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