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.社会学习（social learning）指某一动物的行为可助力另一动物获取全新信息，现有相关证据在分类学上多集中于哺乳纲动物，尤其是灵长类，以及鸟类。然而，社会学习并不局限于群居动物，因为互动频率较低的物种仍可通过学习规避潜在天敌、获取食物来源、识别竞争者与配偶而获益。本研究以澳大利亚东部以独居为主的雄性石龙子（Eulamprus quoyii）为对象，开展两步式觅食任务训练。实验将受试蜥蜴分为“幼年”与“老年”两个年龄组，分别让其完成两项新颖任务：一项为操作任务（掀开盖子），另一项为联想任务（奖励藏于蓝色盖子下方）。本研究未发现操作任务存在年龄依赖性学习的证据；但在有示范者的情况下，幼年雄性石龙子学习联想任务的速度显著快于无示范者的幼年个体，而老年雄性石龙子在两种实验处理下的成功率并无显著差异。本研究首次证实了蜥蜴类动物存在年龄依赖性社会学习，并指出利用社会信息进行学习的现象可能比此前认知中更为普遍。