The Role of Social Organization on Development and Learning

本研究的目的是探索社会组织对鸟类学习的影响，并找到发展原则来指导其他群体（包括人类）的声音交流研究。特别有趣的是，当动物生活在一个信息丰富的环境中时，它们是如何有选择地参与、互动并向同类学习的。既然他们没有或不可能平等地向所有的个体学习，那么什么规则指导他们获取和关注社会信息呢？对社会组织的起源和性质的兴趣源于对扩展学习和发展对生态问题的研究的兴趣。有人提出，许多物种典型的知识是通过社会网络传递的，在社会群体中，较老的生物或同伴促进或限制了信息的暴露。在大多数关于学习的实验室研究中，网络的概念被忽略了，因为通常动物只是暴露在最小的物种典型环境下的刺激下。为了研究社会引导学习，需要研究更高层次的社会组织模式。这些模式是由群体动力学产生的，对成熟和不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，研究人员全年在大型鸟舍中对鸟类进行研究，定期改变鸟类群体的组成，并测量其影响。社会行为和声音行为被记录下来，配偶选择测试被采用，卵被收集和孵化来测量产量、生育能力和生存能力。此外，还将采集血液进行DNA分析。这些过程提供了机会来探索交际能力作为社会学习机会的功能的适应性效应。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？其次，除了年龄和性别之外，特定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？所提出的工作对理解复杂的通信系统，包括人类通信系统具有深远的意义。在最近完成的对人类父母及其婴儿的研究中，我们基于鸟类的社会学习模型测试了关于语言前声音可塑性的假设。研究发现，婴儿的咿呀学语可能受到父母反应的社会影响。父母没有模仿婴儿的声音，因此排除了声音匹配的机制。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的内在本质的观点。因此，提出的鸟类研究提供了一套新的启发式原则，用于制定许多动物声音学习的生态方法的研究问题，以及人类前语言发展等相关现象。

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.