Speakers > Thomas Bugnyar
Thomas Bugnyar U. Vienna, Austria Who is interested in what?
Common marmosets are renowned for their social learning skills, yet they show substantial individual variation in how much they pay attention to, and learn from, conspecifics. Aside ontogenetical and social factors, this variation may reflect the individuals’ predispositions in exploration and learning, as predicted by the speed-accuracy model (Sih & Del Giudice 2012). We here test whether captive and wild marmosets can be characterized along a continuum as fast and slow explorers and whether this correlates with their performance in learning tasks. In a second step, we investigate the relationship between exploration and social learning: according to learning theory, the pattern should be similar as with individual (asocial) learning, i.e. fast explorers should be good social learners; according to information seeking theory, the patterns should be reversed, i.e. slow explorers should prefer watching, and learning from, others. |
