Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?

Learning is ubiquitous in animals: individuals can use their experience to fine-tune behaviour and thus to better adapt to the environment during their lifetime. Observations have accumulated that, at the collective level, groups can also use their experience to improve collective performance. Yet, despite apparent simplicity, the links between individual learning capacities and a collective's performance can be extremely complex. Here we propose a centralized and broadly applicable framework to begin classifying this complexity. Focusing principally on groups with stable composition, we first identify three distinct ways through which groups can improve their collective performance when repeating a task: each member learning to better solve the task on its own, members learning about each other to better respond to one another and members learning to improve their complementarity. We show through selected empirical examples, simulations and theoretical treatments that these three categories identify distinct mechanisms with distinct consequences and predictions. These mechanisms extend well beyond current social learning and collective decision-making theories in explaining collective learning. Finally, our approach, definitions and categories help generate new empirical and theoretical research avenues, including charting the expected distribution of collective learning capacities across taxa and its links to social stability and evolution. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Collective behaviour through time’.