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Mate familiarity and social learning in a monogamous lizard

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posted on 2023-05-19, 17:52 authored by Kirke MunchKirke Munch, Noble, DWA, Erik WapstraErik Wapstra, Geoffrey WhileGeoffrey While
Social learning is thought to be advantageous as it allows an animal to gather information quickly without engaging in costly trial-and-error learning. However, animals should be selective about when and whom they learn from. Familiarity is predicted to positively inluence an animal’s reliance on social learning; yet, few studies have empirically tested this theory. We used a lizard (Liopholis whitii) that forms long-term monogamous pair bonds to examine the efects of partner familiarity on social learning in two novel foraging tasks, an association and reversal task. We allowed female lizards to observe trained conspeciics that were either familiar (social mate) or unfamiliar execute these tasks and compared these two groups with control females that did not receive social information. Lizards preferentially relied on trial-and-error learning in the association task. In the reversal task, lizards that were demonstrated by familiar partners learnt in fewer trials compared to control lizards and made more correct choices. Our results provide some evidence for context-dependent learning with lizards diferentiating between when they utilize social learning, and, to a limited degree, whom they learnt from. Understanding the role of the social context in which learning occurs provides important insight into the beneits of social learning and sociality more generally.

Funding

Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment

History

Publication title

Oecologia

Volume

188

Pagination

1-10

ISSN

0029-8549

Department/School

School of Natural Sciences

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Place of publication

175 Fifth Ave, New York, USA, Ny, 10010

Rights statement

Copyright 2018 Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in the biological sciences

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