ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Social learning through associative processes: a computational theory.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. 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.
- Prior preferences interfere with the associative learning of food values.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Learning pathway determines motor organization and long-term retention of tool use in hornbills.iScience · 2026Article
- Social learning of emotion and its implication for memory: an ERP study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Feature-based reward learning shapes human social learning strategies.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Nestling birds learn socially to eavesdrop on heterospecific alarm calls through acoustic association.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Sequences and animal intelligence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- An associative account of collective learning.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Bumblebee social learning outcomes correlate with their flower-facing behaviour.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Disentangling the contribution of individual and social learning processes in human advice-taking behavior.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- What Are Group Level Traits and How Do They Evolve?Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2023Article
- A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes.PloS one · 2023Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Replications, Comparisons, Sampling and the Problem of Representativeness in Animal Cognition Research.Animal behavior and cognition · 2021Article
- Do Emotional Cues Influence the Performance of Domestic Dogs in an Observational Learning Task?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- A-learning: A new formulation of associative learning theory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Review
- The neural and computational systems of social learning.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Review
- A Comparison of Individual Learning and Social Learning in Zebrafish Through an Ethorobotics Approach.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social transmission of information is a key phenomenon in the evolution of behaviour and in the establishment of traditions and culture. The diversity of social learning phenomena has engendered a diverse terminology and numerous ideas about underlying learning mechanisms, at the same time that some researchers have called for a unitary analysis of social learning in terms of associative processes. Leveraging previous attempts and a recent computational formulation of associative learning, we analyse the following learning scenarios in some generality: learning responses to social stimuli, including learning to imitate; learning responses to non-social stimuli; learning sequences of actions; learning to avoid danger. We conceptualize social learning as situations in which stimuli that arise from other individuals have an important role in learning. This role is supported by genetic predispositions that either cause responses to social stimuli or enable social stimuli to reinforce specific responses. Simulations were performed using a new learning simulator program. The simulator is publicly available and can be used for further theoretical investigations and to guide empirical research of learning and behaviour. Our explorations show that, when guided by genetic predispositions, associative processes can give rise to a wide variety of social learning phenomena, such as stimulus and local enhancement, contextual imitation and simple production imitation, observational conditioning, and social and response facilitation. In addition, we clarify how associative mechanisms can result in transfer of information and behaviour from experienced to naive individuals.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.