The Role of Social Organization on Development and Learning

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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.