Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning
Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning
复制标题
DOI：
10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.04.003
复制
发表时间：
2005-11-01
影响因子：
5.1
通讯作者：
Paciotti, B
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
McElreath, R;Lubell, M;Paciotti, B
在某种程度上，文化进化是由个体从他人那里获取行为的策略所驱动的。这些策略本身在一定程度上是自然选择的产物，这使得对社会学习的研究本质上是达尔文主义的项目。社会学习进化的正式模型表明，对社会学习的依赖应该随着任务难度的增加而增加，随着环境变化的可能性而减少。这些模型还预测了个体如何整合来自多个同伴的信息。我们提出了旨在评估这些预测的微观社会实验的结果。第一个实验测量了在任务难度变化和选择收益时间波动的双臂强盗环境下的基线个人学习策略。我们的第二个实验研究的是在相同环境中的人们如何使用来自单个同伴的最小社会信息。我们的第三个实验在第二个实验的基础上进行了扩展，允许研究其他几个人的行为，允许使用与频率相关的策略，比如从众。在每一个实验中，我们改变了任务难度和环境波动。我们提出了几种候选策略，并在实验环境中计算了每种策略的预期收益。然后，我们将不同的社会信息使用模型拟合到数据中，并通过模型比较技术确定最佳拟合模型。我们发现了从众和不从众社会学习的大量证据，并将我们的结果与理论预期进行了比较。(c) 2005爱思唯尔公司版权所有。
Cultural evolution is driven, in part, by the strategies that individuals employ to acquire behavior from others. These strategies themselves are partly products of natural selection, making the study of social learning an inherently Darwinian project. Formal models of the evolution of social learning suggest that reliance on social learning should increase with task difficulty and decrease with the probability of environmental change. These models also make predictions about how individuals integrate information from multiple peers. We present the results of microsociety experiments designed to evaluate these predictions. The first experiment measures baseline individual learning strategy in a two-armed bandit environment with variation in task difficulty and temporal fluctuation in the payoffs of the options. Our second experiment addresses how people in the same environment use minimal social information from a single peer. Our third experiment expands on the second by allowing access to the behavior of several other individuals, permitting frequency-dependent strategies like conformity. In each of these experiments, we vary task difficulty and environmental fluctuation. We present several candidate strategies and compute the expected payoffs to each in our experimental environment. We then fit to the data the different models of the use of social information and identify the best-fitting model via model comparison techniques. We find substantial evidence of both conformist and nonconformist social learning and compare our results to theoretical expectations. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.