The influence of social rank on learning in a group-living fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dominance hierarchies are found in many group-living species, and an individual’s social rank can influence their access to resources, behaviours and physiology. However, the effect of rank on learning capability has not been well studied. Here, we examined how rank influences learning in the group-living cichlid fish Neolamprologus pulcher . We tested learning in both dominant and subordinate fish and investigated whether rank is related to the capacity to learn independently as well as from others. Fish learned to move coloured discs to access a food reward, either by trial and error on their own, or by watching a trained demonstrator. We found no differences between ranks in the individual associative learning task, but subordinates were faster at changing their behaviour when we changed the reward rules (during the reversal learning phase). We also found no differences in the number of trials it took dominants and subordinates to socially learn the task (from watching demonstrators), but individuals learned the task faster when they could observe others. Our results indicate that some aspects of cognition can be influenced by social rank, but rank does not appear to affect general learning ability.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".