Movement and conformity interact to establish local behavioural traditions in animal populations

The social transmission of information is critical to the emergence of animal culture. Two processes are predicted to play key roles in how socially-transmitted information spreads in animal populations: the movement of individuals across the landscape and conformist social learning. We develop a model that, for the first time, explicitly integrates these processes to investigate their impacts on the spread of behavioural preferences. Our results reveal a strong interplay between movement and conformity in determining whether locally-variable traditions establish across a landscape or whether a single preference dominates the whole population. The model is able to replicate a real-world cultural diffusion experiment in great tits Parus major, but also allows for a range of predictions for the emergence of animal culture under various initial conditions, habitat structure and strength of conformist bias to be made. Integrating social behaviour with ecological variation will be important for understanding the stability and diversity of culture in animals.

信息的社会传播对于动物文化的形成至关重要。据推测，有两个过程在社会传播信息于动物种群内的扩散进程中扮演关键角色：个体跨景观移动，以及从众社会学习（conformist social learning）。本研究首次构建了明确整合这两类过程的模型，以探究二者对行为偏好扩散的影响。研究结果显示，个体移动与从众偏向之间存在极强的交互作用，这决定了景观中究竟会形成具有空间异质性的文化传统，还是会出现单一偏好主导整个种群的局面。该模型不仅能够复现大山雀（Parus major）的真实世界文化扩散实验，还可针对不同初始条件、生境结构以及从众偏向强度下动物文化的形成情况作出一系列预测。将社会行为与生态变异相结合，对于理解动物文化的稳定性与多样性具有重要意义。