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Age-dependent social learning in a lizard

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Date
09/07/2014
Author
Noble, Danial W A
Byrne, Richard William
Whiting, Martin J
Keywords
QH301 Biology
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Abstract
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.
Citation
Noble , D W A , Byrne , R W & Whiting , M J 2014 , ' Age-dependent social learning in a lizard ' , Biology Letters , vol. 10 , no. 7 , 0430 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0430
Publication
Biology Letters
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2014.0430
ISSN
1744-9561
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2014 Royal Society. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Biology Letters on 9 July 2014, available online: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/7/20140430
 
© 2014 Royal Society. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Biology Letters on 9 July 2014, available online: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/7/20140430/suppl/DC1
Description
Funding: Australian Funding Council
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6941

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