Data from: Age-dependent social learning in a lizard

Evidence of social learning, whereby the actions of an animal facilitate
the acquisition of new information by another, is taxonomically biased
towards mammals, especially primates, and birds. However, social learning
need not be limited to group-living animals because species with less
interaction can still benefit from learning about potential predators,
food sources, rivals and mates. We trained male skinks (Eulamprus quoyii),
a mostly solitary lizard from eastern Australia, in a two-step foraging
task. Lizards belonging to ‘young’ and ‘old’ age classes were presented
with a novel instrumental task (displacing a lid) and an association task
(reward under blue lid). We did not find evidence for age-dependent
learning of the instrumental task; however, young males in the presence of
a demonstrator learnt the association task faster than young males without
a demonstrator, whereas old males in both treatments had similar success
rates. We present the first evidence of age-dependent social learning in a
lizard and suggest that the use of social information for learning may be
more widespread than previously believed.