ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
Behavioural specialization and learning in social networks.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Global meta-analysis reveals urban-associated behavioural differences among wild populations.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Pooled it
- Conformity to popular, not average, opinions: Models, data, and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- 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
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Conformity to continuous and discrete ordered traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The evolutionary consequences of learning under competition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Impact of Educational Activity Formats, Online or In-Person, on the Intention of Medical Specialists to Adopt a Clinical Behaviour: A Comparative Study.Journal of CME · 2024Article
- Skill trade-offs promote persistent individual differences and specialized tactics.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Behavioural specialization and learning in social networks.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Heterogeneous responsiveness to environmental stimuli.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
- Flexible learning in complex worlds.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interactions in social groups can promote behavioural specialization. One way this can happen is when individuals engage in activities with two behavioural options and learn which option to choose. We analyse interactions in groups where individuals learn from playing games with two actions and negatively frequency-dependent payoffs, such as producer-scrounger, caller-satellite, or hawk-dove games. Group members are placed in social networks, characterized by the group size and the number of neighbours to interact with, ranging from just a few neighbours to interactions between all group members. The networks we analyse include ring lattices and the much-studied small-world networks. By implementing two basic reinforcement-learning approaches, action-value learning and actor-critic learning, in different games, we find that individuals often show behavioural specialization. Specialization develops more rapidly when there are few neighbours in a network and when learning rates are high. There can be learned specialization also with many neighbours, but we show that, for action-value learning, behavioural consistency over time is higher with a smaller number of neighbours. We conclude that frequency-dependent competition for resources is a main driver of specialization. We discuss our theoretical results in relation to experimental and field observations of behavioural specialization in social situations.
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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.