Social Learning in a Cooperatively Breeding Bird

在合作繁殖的鸟类和哺乳动物中，前一窝的后代推迟了独立繁殖，留在父母身边，并帮助抚养后代。对这种行为的一种可能解释是“技能”假说，该假说认为，幼鸟需要这段时间来学习成功觅食和筑巢所需的技能。Vehrencamp博士和她的学生们将采用实地实验和描述技术相结合的方法，研究合作繁殖的喜鹊的幼鸟获得成年觅食技能的过程。喜鹊是一种聪明的热带物种，饮食极其广泛，觅食策略也多种多样。通过确定社会学习传递的信息类型和促进该物种社会学习的机制（复制或模仿），Vehrencamp博士将能够更好地评估动物复杂行为的个体（试错法）学习和社会学习的相对重要性。最终，这种对动物的研究应该有助于查明依赖社会学习获得新行为的限制，从而解释为什么复制和文化变异是人类的主要特征。

Among cooperatively-breeding birds and mammals, offspring from previous broods delay independent breeding, remain with their parents, and assist in rearing subsequent broods. One possible explanation for this behavior is the "skills" hypothesis, which argues that young need this period of time to learn the skills required for successful foraging and nesting. Using a mixture of field experimental and descriptive techniques, Dr. Vehrencamp and her students will investigate the process by which young birds acquire adult foraging skills in the cooperatively-breeding magpie jay, an intelligent, tropical species with an extremely broad diet and diverse array of foraging tactics. By determining the types of information transmitted by social learning and the mechanisms that promote social learning (copying or imitation) in this species, Dr. Vehrencamp will be better able to assess the relative importance of individual (trial-and-error) learning and social learning of complex behavior in animals. Ultimately, such research on animals should help to pinpoint the constraints upon the reliance on social learning for the acquisition of novel behavior and thus why copying and cultural variation are primarily human traits.