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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 24, 2025

The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
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Published on: August 25, 2023

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Increased initial task difficulty drives social foragers to develop sub-optimal conformity instead of adaptive

Đorđe Marković1, Na'ama Aljadeff1, Lucy M Aplin2,3

  • 1School of Zoology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel.

Royal Society Open Science
|July 7, 2023
PubMed
Summary

Increased task difficulty shifted house sparrows from adaptive social diversity to conformity. This highlights how cognitive demands, not just learning strategies, influence social behavior in animal societies.

Keywords:
cognitionconformitysocial foragingsocial learning

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Area of Science:

  • Animal behavior
  • Cognitive ecology
  • Social learning

Background:

  • Social learning is often viewed through the lens of adaptive strategies.
  • The role of task difficulty in shaping social learning dynamics is less explored.
  • Previous studies on house sparrows showed adaptive social diversity in foraging tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how initial task difficulty influences social learning and conformity in house sparrows.
  • To determine if increasing task difficulty can shift behavior from adaptive diversity to social conformity.
  • To assess the impact of cognitive demands on social learning dynamics.

Main Methods:

  • House sparrows were presented with a foraging task involving opening feeding well covers and choosing rewarded cues.
  • The task difficulty was increased by omitting pre-training on opening the covers, making social learning initially more critical.
  • Behavioral responses were observed and compared to previous studies with lower initial task difficulty.

Main Results:

  • Increasing initial task difficulty led to predominantly conformist behavior in house sparrows.
  • Sparrows conformed to demonstrated cues even when an alternative, individually easier, rewarding cue was available.
  • This contrasts with previous findings of adaptive social diversity under less demanding conditions.

Conclusions:

  • Task cognitive demands, particularly the initial reliance on social learning, can significantly alter social behavior.
  • Sub-optimal social conformity can emerge in social animals due to task difficulty, overriding adaptive diversity.
  • The interplay between task characteristics and learning strategies is crucial for understanding social dynamics in animal populations.