Differing effects of familiarity/kinship in the social transmission of fear associations and food preferences in rats
Differing effects of familiarity/kinship in the social transmission of fear associations and food preferences in rats
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DOI：
10.1007/s10071-019-01292-z
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发表时间：
2019-11-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.7
通讯作者：
Monfils, Marie-H.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Agee, Laura A.;Jones, Carolyn E.;Monfils, Marie-H.
尽管具有明显的适应性优势，但过去的研究发现，社会示威者的更大熟悉度和/或家庭相关性并不能增强食物偏好范式的社会传播中的社会学习。这一发现与在恐惧介导的社会学习范式中检查示威者特征的影响的研究背道而驰，其中示威者的熟悉度和/或相关性的增加会促进观察者大鼠的更高学习率。在我们的第一个实验中，我们能够证实这一发现：与演示者的熟悉度/相关性的增加并不能增强对社会传播的食物偏好的习得。此外，在对获得社会传播的食物偏好过程中观察者和示威者之间的社会行为进行检查时，没有观察到社会接触和习得偏好表达之间的类似关系。在我们的第二个实验中，我们提供了进一步的证据，表明熟悉/相关性可能会增强对中性听觉线索的恐惧反应的社会习得，并证明这种效应不仅仅是习得过程中观察者与其示威者之间社会接触增加的结果。尽管两种观察者类型的提示后接触水平相似，但当观察者与示威者熟悉/相关但不新颖/不相关时，提示后社交接触与社交获得性恐惧行为的表达之间观察到正相关。这些发现既验证了先前关于熟悉/相关性在这两种社会学习范式中的作用的研究，并提供了进一步的行为证据，表明独特的社会机制可能有助于调解恐惧的社会传播。
Despite its apparent adaptive advantages, past research has found that greater familiarity and/or familial relatedness of a social demonstrator does not enhance social learning in the social transmission of food preference paradigm. This finding runs counter to research examining the effects of demonstrator characteristics in fear-mediated social learning paradigms, in which increased familiarity and/or relatedness of a demonstrator promotes higher rates of learning in observer rats. In our first experiment, we were able to corroborate the finding that increased familiarity/relatedness to the demonstrator does not enhance acquisition of a socially transmitted food preference. Furthermore, on examination of the social behavior between observers and their demonstrators during the acquisition of a socially transmitted food preference, no analogous relationship between social contact and expression of the learned preference was observed. In our second experiment, we provide further evidence that familiarity/relatedness may enhance the social acquisition of a fear response to an otherwise neutral auditory cue and demonstrate that this effect is not solely the result of increased social contact between the observer and their demonstrator during acquisition. Despite similar levels of post-cue contact in both observer types, a positive correlation was observed between post-cue social contact and expression of a socially acquired fear behavior when the observer was familiar/related to their demonstrator but not novel/unrelated. These findings both validate previous research on the role of familiarity/relatedness in these two social learning paradigms and provide further behavioral evidence that unique social mechanisms may serve to mediate the social transmission of fear.