Early maternal care predicts reliance on social learning about food in adult rats
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many vertebrates rely extensively on social information, but the value of information produced by other individuals will vary across contexts and habitats. Social learning may thus be optimized by the use of developmental or current cues to determine its likely value. Here, we show that a developmental cue, early maternal care, correlates with social learning propensities in adult rodents. The maternal behavior of rats Rattus norvegicus with their litters was scored over the first 6 days postpartum. Rat dams show consistent individual differences in the rate they lick and groom (LG) pups, allowing them to be categorized as high, low, or mid-LG mothers. The 100-day old male offspring of high and low-LG mothers were given the opportunity to learn food preferences for novel diets from conspecifics that had previously eaten these diets ("demonstrators"). Offspring of high-LG mothers socially learned food preferences, but offspring of low-LG mothers did not. We administered oxytocin to subjects to address the hypothesis that it would increase the propensity for social learning, but there were no detectable effects. Our data raise the possibility that social learning propensities may be both relatively stable throughout life and part of a suite of traits "adaptively programmed" by early developmental experiences.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it