The Role of Social Organization on Development and Learning

Meredith J. West：社会组织对发展和learningLay的作用摘要提出的研究的目的是探索社会组织对鸟类学习的影响，并找到发展的原则，以指导其他群体，包括人类的声音交流的研究。特别感兴趣的是，当动物生活在一个信息丰富的环境中时，如何选择性地参与，互动，并向其物种的其他成员学习。鉴于他们没有或不能平等地从所有人那里学习，那么什么规则指导他们获取和关注社会信息？对社会组织的起源和性质的兴趣源于对将学习和发展的研究扩展到生态问题的兴趣。有人提出，许多物种的典型知识是通过社交网络，社会群体中的老年人或同行促进或限制暴露于信息。在大多数关于学习的实验室研究中，网络的概念都被绕过了，因为通常动物只是暴露在最小的物种典型背景下的刺激中。为了研究社会引导的学习，更高层次的社会组织模式进行调查。这些模式是由群体动态产生的，对成熟和未成熟的雄性和雌性产生不同的发育影响。为了探索这种影响，在大型鸟舍中全年对鸟类进行研究，其中定期改变群体的组成并测量影响。社会和声音的行为被记录下来，配偶选择测试，收集和孵化鸡蛋来测量生产，生育能力和生存能力。此外，还将采集血液进行DNA分析。这些程序提供了一个机会，探讨社会学习的机会对交际能力的适应性影响。这项工作的重点是关于因果关系和功能的问题。首先，是否有简单的规则来指导社会分类，以及社会组织如何影响学习？第二，除了年龄或性别之外，具体的行为特征如何影响群体的形成，以及这些群体如何影响个体的发展轨迹？这项工作对于理解复杂的通信系统，包括人类通信系统，具有深远的影响。在最近完成的工作与人类父母和他们的婴儿，假设进行了测试，我们的语言前的声音可塑性的基础上，鸟类的社会学习模型。研究发现，婴儿的牙牙学语可能会受到父母反应的社会影响。父母没有用声音模仿婴儿的声音，因此排除了声音匹配作为一种机制。这是第一个显示这种关系的数据，它们挑战了长期存在但未经检验的关于早期语言发展先天性质的观点。因此，拟议中的鸟类研究提供了一套新的启发式原则，制定生态学方法的研究问题，在许多动物的声乐学习，以及相关的现象，如人类的前语言的发展。

Meredith J. West: The role of social organization on development and learningLay abstract The aim of the proposed research is to explore the effects of social organization on avian learning and to find developmental principles to guide research on vocal communication in other groups, including humans. Of special interest is how animals, when living in an information-rich environment, selectively attend, interact, and learn from other members of their species. Given that they do not or cannot learn equally from all individuals, what rules guide access and attention to social information? Interest in the origins and nature of social organization stems from an interest in expanding the study of learning and development toward ecological concerns. It is proposed that much species-typical knowledge is delivered via social networks, social groups in which older organisms or peers facilitate or constrain exposure to information. The idea of networks has been bypassed in most laboratory research on learning because generally the animals are simply exposed to stimulation delivered with minimal species-typical context. To study socially guided learning, higher-level patterns of social organization are to be investigated. These are patterns that result from flock dynamics, yielding different developmental effects for mature and immature males and females. To explore about such effects, birds are studied throughout the year in large aviaries in which the composition of groups is periodically altered and the effects measured. Social and vocal behavior is recorded, mate choice tests employed, and eggs collected and incubated to measure production, fertility, and viability. In addition, blood will be taken for DNA analyses. These procedures afford the chance to explore adaptive effects on communicative competence as a function of opportunities for social learning. The work is focused on questions regarding causation and function. First, are there simple rules to guide social assortment, and how does social organization affect learning? Second, how do specific behavioral traits, beyond age or sex, affect formation of groups and how do such groups affect developmental trajectories of individuals? The proposed work has far-reaching implications for understanding complex communication systems, including the human communication system. In recently completed work with human parents and their infants, hypotheses were tested by us about prelinguistic vocal plasticity based on avian models of social learning. It was found that infant babbling could be socially shaped by parental responses. Parents did not vocally imitate infants' sounds, thus ruling out vocal matching as a mechanism. These are the first data to show such a relationship and they challenge long standing but untested ideas about the innate nature of early speech development. Thus, the proposed avian studies provide a new set of heuristic principles with which to formulate research questions on ecological approaches to vocal learning in many animals, as well as related phenomena such as human prelinguistic development.