ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
The conceptual foundations of network-based diffusion analysis: choosing networks and interpreting results.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Mechanotransduction and inflammation: An updated comprehensive representation.Mechanobiology in medicine · 2025Article
- Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Chimpanzee communities differ in their inter- and intrasexual social relationships.Learning & behavior · 2023Article
- The influence of task difficulty, social tolerance and model success on social learning in Barbary macaques.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cultural diffusion dynamics depend on behavioural production rules.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Captive Asian short-clawed otters (Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Food discovery is associated with different reliance on social learning and lower cognitive flexibility across environments in a food-caching bird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Processing of novel food reveals payoff and rank-biased social learning in a wild primate.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Tutors do not facilitate rapid resource exploitation in temporary tadpole aggregations.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- The modularity of a social group does not affect the transmission speed of a novel, socially learned behaviour, or the formation of local variants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Learning strategies and long-term memory in Asian short-clawed otters (Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Choosing a sensible cut-off point: assessing the impact of uncertainty in a social network on the performance of NBDA.Primates; journal of primatology · 2019Article
- Cultural transmission modes of music sampling traditions remain stable despite delocalization in the digital age.PloS one · 2019Article
- Innovation and social transmission in experimental micro-societies: exploring the scope of cumulative culture in young children.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Cooperation and cheating as innovation: insights from cellular societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Innovation: an emerging focus from cells to societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Social learning in otters.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
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Abstract
Network-based diffusion analysis (NBDA) is a statistical technique for detecting the social transmission of behavioural innovations in groups of animals, including humans. The strength of social transmission is inferred from the extent to which the diffusion (spread) of the innovation follows a social network. NBDA can have two goals: (a) to establish whether social transmission is occurring and how strong its effects are; and/or (b) to establish the typical pathways of information transfer. The technique has been used in a range of taxa, including primates, cetaceans, birds and fish, using a range of different types of network. Here I investigate the conceptual underpinnings of NBDA, in order to establish the meaning of results using different networks. I develop a model of the social transmission process where each individual observation of the target behaviour affects the rate at which the observer learns that behaviour. I then establish how NBDAs using different networks relate to this underlying process, and thus how we can interpret the results of each. My analysis shows that a different network or networks are appropriate depending on the specific goal or goals of the study, and establishes how the parameter estimates yielded from an NBDA can be interpreted for different networks.This article is part of the themed issue 'Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies'.
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