Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity

Orde Marković*, Na'ama Aljadeff, Lucy M. Aplin, Arnon Lotem

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The extent to which animal societies exhibit social conformity as opposed to behavioural diversity is commonly attributed to adaptive learning strategies. Less attention is given to the possibility that the relative difficulty of learning a task socially as opposed to individually can be critical for social learning dynamics. Here we show that by raising initial task difficulty, house sparrows previously shown to exhibit adaptive social diversity become predominantly conformists. The task we used required opening feeding well covers (easier to learn socially) and to choose the covers with the rewarding cues (easy to learn individually). We replicated a previous study where sparrows exhibited adaptive diversity, but did not pre-train the naive sparrows to open covers, making the task initially more difficult. In sharp contrast to the previous study results, most sparrows continued to conform to the demonstrated cue even after experiencing greater success with the alternative rewarding cue for which competition was less intense. Thus, our study shows that a task's cognitive demands, such as the initial dependency on social demonstration, can change the entire learning dynamics, causing social animals to exhibit sub-optimal social conformity rather than adaptive diversity under otherwise identical conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Article number230715
JournalRoyal Society Open Science
Volume10
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - 5 Jul 2023

Funding

FundersFunder number
Israel Science Foundation1126/19
Israel Science Foundation

    Keywords

    • cognition
    • conformity
    • social foraging
    • social learning

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this