Social learning
Social learning is an umbrella term for the learning pathway that includes transfer of skills, concepts, rules and strategies that occur in social contexts and can affect individual behavior. Types of social learning include (i) social facilitation (increased probability of performing a behavior in the presence of a conspecific), (ii) local enhancement (an individual’s interest in an object or location mediates interest/movement by others), and (iii) imitation (novel copying of a model behavior through observation that results in a reliably similar outcome) (Visalberghi and Fragaszy 1990). Note that these are distinct from the transfer of declarative or procedural information via direct information exchange, such as in bee dancing, to relay information concerning resource locations (Leadbeater & Chittka 2007)
Each type of social learning is relevant to movement ecology. For example, social facilitation explains movement in bison: individuals were more likely to travel to a given new location when in a group where another animal had knowledge of that location (Sigaudet al. 2017). Local enhancement also occurs in ants where leaders provide guidance to naïve individuals as to the location of food resources (Franks & Richardson 2006), and in elephants where matriarchs lead herds to waterholes not known to the rest of the group (Fishlocket al. 2016). Imitation can be seen in fish, where translocation experiments demonstrate how naïve individuals learn migration routes through association with experienced individuals (Helfman & Schultz 1984), as well as in replacement experiments where the long-term re-use of resting and mating sites can be socially learned rather than selected on the basis of quality (Warner 1988).
Individual learning can interact with social learning. For example, independent exploration allows ants to improve upon the paths they have learned via social learning through tandem running (Franklin and Franks 2012). Here, independent exploration is the basis for improvement of route navigation, which can then be distributed within a colony via ‘information cascades.’ More generally, individual learning may be modulated by associational acquisition, where the options for individual learning are constrained by the choice of individuals with which an animal associates (Fragaszy & Visalberghi 2004).
Social learning is emphasized though existing social bonds, such as when it manifests vertically from parent to offspring. For example, elephants will learn resource locations in complex landscapes through both vertical and horizontal transmission (Bowell et al. 1996) and long-term pairing may enhance transmission between maternal-offspring pairs. For example, paired whales may complete entire migrations together (Hamilton & Cooper 2010), thus enhancing the potential for social learning.
However, social learning does not always confer a net benefit (Giraldeauet al . 2002), and may result in costly strategies of movement and resource use (Sigaudet al. 2017). For example, tested alone, adult female guppies that had shoaled with trained conspecifics as they swam to food used the same route used by their trained fellows, even if the route taken by the trained shoal was longer and more energetically costly than were alternative routes (Laland & Williams 1997, Giraldeau et al . 2002).