Food discovery is associated with different reliance on social learning and lower cognitive flexibility across environments in a food caching bird

Social learning is a primary mechanism for information acquisition in social species. Despite many benefits, social learning may be disadvantageous when independent learning is more efficient. For example, searching independently may be more advantageous when food sources are ephemeral and unpredictable. Individual differences in cognitive abilities such as spatial memory, which affect an individual’s environmental predictability, can also be expected to influence social information use. We investigated how resident food-caching chickadees discovered multiple novel food sources in both harsher, less predictable high elevation and milder, more predictable low elevation winter environments. Chickadees at high elevation were faster at discovering multiple novel food sources and discovered more food sources than birds at low elevation. Using network-based diffusion analyses, we found that while birds at both elevations used social information, the contribution of social learning to novel fo...

社会学习是社会性物种获取信息的核心机制。尽管社会学习具备诸多优势，但当独立学习效率更高时，其反而可能产生不利影响。例如，当食物来源短暂且不可预测时，独立搜寻往往更具优势。诸如空间记忆这类会影响个体环境预判能力的认知能力差异，同样会对社会信息的利用产生影响。本研究针对栖息于高海拔（冬季环境更严酷、可预测性更低）与低海拔（冬季环境更温和、可预测性更高）的定居性储食山雀，探究它们如何发现多个新型食物来源。相较于低海拔的山雀，高海拔山雀发现多个新型食物来源的速度更快，且发现的食物来源数量更多。通过基于网络的扩散分析（network-based diffusion analyses），我们发现尽管两个海拔区域的山雀均会利用社会信息，但社会学习对新型食物……