![]() Such phenomena in animals have received considerable attention because researchers hoped to discover the key evolutionary ingredients of the cultural processes that define us as humans. Examples are potato washing and termite fishing in primates, pinecone stripping in rodents and milk bottle opening in birds. ![]() Social learning is widespread in animals and can enable novel behavior routines, sometimes introduced by a single “innovator,” to spread among individuals in a group. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. LC was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. OJL was funded by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation. XZ was funded by the Staff Development Programme of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), Chinese Academy of Sciences. CJP was funded by a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: SA was funded by the Fyssen Foundation. ![]() Received: ApAccepted: AugPublished: October 4, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Alem et al. PLoS Biol 14(10):Īcademic Editor: Matthieu Louis, Centre for Genomic Regulation, SPAIN (2016) Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect. These results suggest that learning a nonnatural task in bumblebees can spread culturally through populations.Ĭitation: Alem S, Perry CJ, Zhu X, Loukola OJ, Ingraham T, Søvik E, et al. We found that once one bee knew how to string pull, over time, most of the foraging bees learned from the initially trained bee or from bees who had learned from the trained bee, even after the initial demonstrator was no longer available. ![]() We then tested whether bees could pass this information to others during a semi-natural situation involving several colonies. Learning the behavior through observation relied on bees paying attention to both the string and the position of the trained demonstrator bee while pulling the string. Naïve bees learned how to pull strings by observing trained demonstrators from a distance. Here, we first show that bumblebees can be trained to pull a string to access a reward, but most could not learn on their own. Social insects make use of simple mechanisms to achieve many seemingly complex behaviors and thus may be able to provide a unique resource for uncovering the basic cognitive elements required for culture. This suggests that, so long as animals have a basic toolkit of associative and motor learning processes, the key ingredients for the cultural spread of unusual skills are already in place and do not require sophisticated cognition. We observed that there were several sequential sets (“generations”) of learners, so that previously naïve observers could first acquire the technique by interacting with skilled individuals and, subsequently, themselves become demonstrators for the next “generation” of learners, so that the longevity of the skill in the population could outlast the lives of informed foragers. In cultural diffusion experiments, the skill spread rapidly from a single knowledgeable individual to the majority of a colony’s foragers. Learning the behavior relied on a combination of simple associative mechanisms and trial-and-error learning and did not require “insight”: naïve bees failed a “coiled-string experiment,” in which they did not receive instant visual feedback of the target moving closer when tugging on the string. In addition, naïve bees learnt the task by observing a trained demonstrator from a distance. Only a small minority “innovated” and solved the task spontaneously, but most bees were able to learn to pull a string when trained in a stepwise manner. We first explored whether bumblebees can learn a nonnatural object manipulation task by using string pulling to access a reward that was presented out of reach. Social insects make elaborate use of simple mechanisms to achieve seemingly complex behavior and may thus provide a unique resource to discover the basic cognitive elements required for culture, i.e., group-specific behaviors that spread from “innovators” to others in the group via social learning.
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