Monkeys who experience more feeding competition utilize social information to learn foraging skills faster
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animals must learn foraging skills to successfully survive and reproduce but the sources of interindividual variation in learning are poorly understood. For example, there is little consensus on the role motivation plays, even though it is a key factor impacting learning outcomes in humans. Here, we conduct a field experiment on a wild primate to investigate whether an individual's vulnerability to feeding competition impacts their motivation to learn a beneficial foraging technique. We provided a group of monkeys with a food reward (i.e., a half banana) that needed to be retrieved from a box. The monkeys discovered an efficient technique that consistently allowed them to retrieve the banana quickly, decreasing the risk of food loss to competitors. We found that individuals who frequently experienced feeding competition learned this efficient technique significantly faster than individuals who rarely foraged in the presence of a dominant competitor. They appeared to use social learning to learn faster as they were more attentive to the handling techniques others used and improved their foraging skills after opportunities to observe a skilled demonstrator. These findings support that an individual's vulnerability to feeding competition impacts their motivation to learn foraging skills that reduce food loss to competitors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".