The social dynamics of cultural behaviour: transmission biases and adaptive social learning strategies in wild great tits.

所有动物都需要充分利用新的机会或应对不断变化的环境条件。这些变化可能是短期的，如季节变化，也可能是长期的，如气候变化，而且往往影响到粮食资源的供应，并可能影响到生存。一般而言，可采用两种不同的战略来增加在不断变化的环境中获得资源的机会。动物可能会开发新的解决问题的方法（创新），从而自己找到新的资源，或者他们可能会观察其他人并复制成功的解决方案。后者被称为社会学习，预计将比创新更频繁，使新的行为在个人之间迅速传播，并被认为是形成传统的基础。长期以来，生物学家和人类学家一直对社会学习感兴趣;了解动物的行为如何传播和传统如何保持，可以揭示促进人类复杂文化的因素。社会学习的一个重要决定因素是发生学习的种群的社会组织。长期以来，人们一直认为只有人类才能表现出高度发达的文化传播，因为他们的沟通和学习能力是由长期的社会纽带促进的。然而，最近的研究发现，在广泛的动物中，当地保持着文化行为。此外，在人类和其他动物种群中的社会网络分析允许精确测量种群结构。因此，利用社交网络来绘制新行为的传播图，为理解这一重要的学习过程提供了一个令人兴奋的机会。在这项研究中，我们将研究一种常见鸟类大山雀的野生种群中新奇信息的传播。在我们庞大的研究人群中，所有个体都被贴上了微芯片的标签，使我们能够自动跟踪他们;我们的试验数据显示，他们将学习社交。我们将开发两种简单的解决方案之一提供食物的设备，并训练一个人在圈养中解决一个解决方案，然后将其释放回林地，我们将在那里放置一些这样的设备。使用这种方法，我们将能够跟踪谁学到了什么，他们从谁那里学到了什么，以及他们学到了两个解决方案中的哪一个。利用这一人群的社交网络，我们将跟踪新行为的传播，并确定哪些特征使某些个体在传播这些行为时更重要。通过对不同的人进行两种不同的解决方案的培训，我们还将看到当地传统是如何发展和保持的。并非所有的传统或行为都是有利的。例如，在人类中，肥胖可以通过友谊群体传播。在这个项目的第二阶段，我们将通过用低奖励（花生颗粒而不是蠕虫）替换受欢迎的解决方案来改变任务的不同解决方案的奖励，并在不太受欢迎的解决方案上保持高奖励。这将测试坏的传统是否通过社会强化而得以维持，即使存在更好的解决方案，个人也会盲目地模仿大多数人。最后，我们将开发一些新技术，根据他们所属的群体的行为来预测新个人应该学习什么解决方案。通过改变设备上的行为作为回应，我们将详细测试在社交学习时使用了在其他人身上观察到的行为的哪些元素。这将是第一次有人使用主动装置以这种方式直接操纵野生动物的行为。这本身将提高科学家的能力，以了解个人在做出决定时遵循什么规则，例如复制谁和何时复制。这些知识将广泛适用于各个学科，例如通过引入改善生存的行为，为积极保护受威胁物种提供新的机会。

All animals need to make the most of new opportunities or deal with changing environmental conditions. These changes may be short-term such as seasonal change, or long-term shifts such as climate change, and often impact the availability of food resources and, potentially, survival. Broadly, two different strategies might be used to increase access to resources in a changing environment. Animals might develop new solutions to problems (innovation), and thus find new resources themselves, or they might observe others and copy successful solutions. The latter, called social learning, is expected to be much more frequent than innovation, allows new behaviours to spread rapidly between individuals and is thought to be fundamental in forming traditions. Social learning has long fascinated biologists and anthropologists; understanding how behaviours spread and traditions are maintained in animals can shed light on the factors promoting complex culture in humans.An important determinant of social learning is the social organisation of the population in which learning occurs. It was long thought that only humans could exhibit highly developed cultural transmission due to their capacity for communication and learning that is facilitated by long-term social bonds. However recent research has found locally maintained cultural behaviour in a wide range of animals. Further, social network analysis in both human and other animal populations has allowed population structure to be accurately measured. Thus, using social networks to map the spread of new behaviours provides an exciting opportunity to understand this important learning process.In this study, we will study the spread of novel information in wild populations of a common bird, the great tit. All individuals in our large study population are tagged with microchips allowing us to track them automatically; our pilot data shows that they will learn socially. We will develop devices where one of two simple solutions provides access to food, and train an individual to solve one solution on the task in captivity before releasing it back into the woodland where we will place a number of these devices. Using this approach, we will be able to track who has learnt, from whom they learnt, and which of the two solutions they learnt. Using the social network of this population, we will track the spread of the new behaviours, and determine what characteristics made some individuals more important in spreading them. By training different individuals on the two different solutions, we will also see how local traditions develop and are maintained. Not all traditions or behaviours are advantageous. For example, in humans it has been shown that obesity can spread through friendship groups. In the second phase of this project we will alter the reward to different solutions of the task by replacing the popular solution with a low reward (peanut granules instead of a worm), maintaining the high reward on the less popular solution. This will test whether bad traditions are maintained through social reinforcement where individuals blindly copy the majority even when better solutions exist.Finally, we will develop some new technology that will predict what solution new individuals should be learning based upon the behavior of the group they belong to. By changing the behaviour at the device in response, we will then test in detail what elements of the behaviour observed in others is used when social learning. This will be the first time that anyone has used an active device to directly manipulate the behaviour of wild animals in this way. This will itself advance scientists' abilities to understand what rules individuals follow when making decisions such as who to copy and when. Such knowledge will be widely applicable across disciplines, for example in providing new opportunities for active conservation of threatened species by introducing behaviours that improve survival.