Evolutionary Psychology (6) - Social learning and culture

Less foraging pressure results in modified activity budget which results in more "play"

Being fed regularly (environmental opportunity hypothesis)

• Mothers who exhibit stone handling have children who exhibit it much sooner
• Implies social learning

Affecting behaviour/phenotype by teaching or social learning

• Model/teacher
• Observer/learner

• Spread of information from individual to individual
• Information spreads across generations very quickly

Emergence and social transmission of a new behaviour in a group

Shared characteristics of an entire group, which has been amassed throughout it's history

Automatic, or reflexive behavioural mimicry as a result of empathy/contagion (fitting in)

• Behavioural contagion
• Social enhancement

• Local enhancement
• Stimulus enhancment
• Response facilitation
• Observational conditioning
• Imitation
• Emulation
• Teaching

• The presence of another causing an individual to express behaviour
• Not influenced by the others' actions

Action of a model individual, focuses attention of an observer who later learns by individual learning

When #3 eats much more food than #1 and #2

When #1 is roughly equal to #2

Existing behaviour is emitted when others do it

• No understanding needed
• Can support additional learning (e.g conditioning to predator stimuli)

Individual sees a conspecific engaging in an activity and begins performing that same general activity (likely not exactly the same)

• Activity of a conspecific focuses the subject's attention on a specific type of stimulus
• Individual learning follows

• Local enhancement focuses attention on a specific area/location
• Stimulus enhancement focuses attention on a specific stimulus

• When an observer is conditioned by watching a conspecific's reaction to stimulus
• e.g Lab raised monkeys learning to fear snakes

• Process-oriented copying
• Observer replicates exact steps of a demonstrator, to achieve the same goal

• Product oriented copying
• Observer attempts to achieve the same goal as a demonstrator, but uses different steps
• E.g omitting irrelevant steps

Emulation

Less time required to achieve goal

High fidelity learning (nothing is lost)

Loss of fidelity (information may be lost)

• Presence
• Observation
• Interaction

• By observing remains of pinecones left by skilled foragers
• Example of stimulus enhancement (pinecone remains are the stimulus)

A skilled individual modifies it's behaviour in the presence of an observer

• Skills are acquired,
• More rapidly
• More similarly
• With higher fidelity/More similarly

Two-way communication

All of them

• No (not at all)
• Often individual learning happens after some social learning has taken place

• Horizontal - Among peers
• Vertical - Parents to offspring
• Oblique

Learning from more distant group members (i.e not close family, or even family at all)

The theory that individuals who spend more time together are more likely to transmit behaviours

• Members of different species
• Hetero- Different
• -specific Species

Identifying some reward stimulus by looking for groups of heterospecifics

A cultural trait, capable of being transmitted

Individuals acquire memes (learning) and transmit them (cutlure)

Horizontal

When organisms fall into groups and natural selection favours some groups over others

Positive correlation (larger relative brain size means more innovation)

Behaviour is what you do, culture is how you learned to do it

• Culture is the way things are done (for a group)
• The things not all groups do
• Culture responds to change

• Genetic/inheritance
• Individual learning
• Social learning

Modification of cultural traits that results in an increase in complexity, diversity or efficiency of the traits