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Dugatkin, L. A., & Godin, J. - G. J. (1993). Female mate copying in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata): age-dependent effects. Behav. Ecol., 4(4), 289–292.
Abstract: Virtually all studies of mate choice to date have assumed that females choose mates independent of one another. Social cues, however, such as the mate choice of conspecifics, may also play an important role in such decisions. Previous work has shown that female guppies of similar age copy each other's choice of mates. Here we examine the effect of relative age on mate choice copying in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata, and examine whether younger individuals are more likely to copy the mate choice of older conspecifics than vice versa. Results indicate that younger females copy the mate choice of older females, but older individuals do not appear to be influenced by the mate choice of younger individuals.
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Galef, B. G. (2013). Imitation and local enhancement: Detrimental effects of consensus definitions on analyses of social learning in animals. Behavioural Processes, 100, 123–130.
Abstract: Development of a widely accepted vocabulary referring to various types of social learning has made important contributions to decades of progress in analyzing the role of socially acquired information in the development of behavioral repertoires. It is argued here that emergence of a consensus vocabulary, while facilitating both communication and research, has also unnecessarily restricted research on social learning. The article has two parts. In the first, I propose that Thorndike, 1898, Thorndike, 1911 definition of imitation as “learning to do an act from seeing it done” has unduly restricted studies of the behavioral processes involved in the propagation of behavior. In part 2, I consider the possibility that success in labeling social learning processes believed to be less cognitively demanding than imitation (e.g. local and stimulus enhancement, social facilitation, etc.) has been mistaken for understanding of those processes, although essentially nothing is known of their stimulus control, development, phylogeny or substrate either behavioral or physiological.
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Kraak, S. B. M. (1996). `Copying mate choice': Which phenomena deserve this term? Behav. Process., 36(1), 99–102.
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Krueger, K., & Heinze, J. (2008). Horse sense: social status of horses (Equus caballus) affects their likelihood of copying other horses` behavior. Anim. Cogn., 11(3), 431–439.
Abstract: Animals that live in stable social groups need to gather information on their own relative position in the group`s social hierarchy, either by directly threatening or challenging others, or in a less costly manner, by observing interactions among others. Such indirect inference of dominance relationships has previously been reported from primates, rats, and birds and fish. Here, we show that domestic horses, Equus caballus, are similarly capable of social cognition. Taking advantage of a specific “following behavior” that horses show towards humans in a riding arena, we investigated whether bystander horses adjust their response to an experimenter according to the observed interaction and their own dominance relationship with the horse whose reaction to the experimenter they had observed before. Horses copied the following behavior towards an experimenter after watching a dominant horse following, but did not follow after observing a subordinate horse or a horse from another social group doing so. The following behavior which horses show towards an experimenter therefore appears to be affected by the demonstrator`s behavior and social status relative to the observer.
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Valone, Thomas J., & Templeton, J. J. (2002). Public information for the assessment of quality: a widespread social phenomenon. Phil. Trans. Biol. Sci., 357(1427), 1549–1557.
Abstract: We propose that the use of public information about the quality of environmental resources, obtained by monitoring the sampling behaviour of others, may be a widespread social phenomenon allowing individuals to make faster, more accurate assessments of their environment. To demonstrate this (i) we define public information and distinguish it from other kinds of social information; (ii) we review empirical work demonstrating the benefits and costs of using public information to estimate food patch quality; (iii) we examine recent work showing that individuals may also be using public information to improve their estimates of the quality of such disparate environmental parameters as breeding patches, opponents and mates; and finally (iv) we suggest avenues of future work to better understand the nature of public information use and when it might be used or ignored. Such work should lead to a more complete understanding of the behaviour of individuals in social aggregations.
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