ArticleBiology letters2016
Copy-when-uncertain: bumblebees rely on social information when rewards are highly variable.
Article in Biology letters, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social information about others' affective states in a human-altered world.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Review
- Experimental manipulation of ecological and cognitive conditions produces the entire conformity-diversity spectrum in a single species.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Siblings and nonparental adults provide alternative pathways to cultural inheritance in juvenile great tits.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Better together than alone: sociality mitigates the negative impact of early family disruption on adult problem-solving performance in zebra finches.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Age polyethism can emerge from social learning: A game-theoretic investigation.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Neural correlates of Bayesian social belief updating in the medial prefrontal cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Pollinator cognition in a plant network.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Consistency and individuality of honeybee stinging behaviour across time and social contexts.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Social demonstration of colour preference improves the learning of associated demonstrated actions.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Social learning and culture in bees: Simple mechanisms, complex outcomes.Journal of biosciences · 2024Review
- Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive diversity.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Article
- Memory and the value of social information in foraging bumble bees.Learning & behavior · 2022Article
- Interindividual variation in the use of social information during learning in honeybees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Foraging Bumblebees Selectively Attend to Other Types of Bees Based on Their Reward-Predictive Value.Insects · 2020Article
- The multi-dimensional nature of information drives prioritization of private over social information in ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Male black widows parasitize mate-searching effort of rivals to find females faster.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Reproductive skew affects social information use.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Considerations for Insect Learning in Integrated Pest Management.Journal of insect science (Online) · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To understand the relative benefits of social and personal information use in foraging decisions, we developed an agent-based model of social learning that predicts social information should be more adaptive where resources are highly variable and personal information where resources vary little. We tested our predictions with bumblebees and found that foragers relied more on social information when resources were variable than when they were not. We then investigated whether socially salient cues are used preferentially over non-social ones in variable environments. Although bees clearly used social cues in highly variable environments, under the same conditions they did not use non-social cues. These results suggest that bumblebees use a 'copy-when-uncertain' strategy.
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