title: Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect.
abstract: 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. 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. 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. In addition, naïve bees learnt the task by observing a trained demonstrator from a distance. 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 cultural diffusion experiments, the skill spread rapidly from a single knowledgeable individual to the majority of a colony's foragers. 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. 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Sylvain
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Alem
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Clint J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Perry
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.|Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun Town, Yunnan, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Xingfu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Olli J
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9094-2004
authors.initials: OJ
authors.lastname: Loukola
authors.affiliation: F1000Research, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ingraham
authors.affiliation: Department of Science and Mathematics, Volda University College, Volda, Norway.
authors.forename: Eirik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Søvik
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Lars
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8153-1732
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chittka
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001516:Bees / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D007858:Learning; D012919:Social Behavior; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis