The social transmission of acquired behavior

The social transmission of acquired behavior may be differentiated from other observable changes in behavior resulting from conspecific interaction by 3 criteria: behavior change is in the direction of homogeneity of behavior between interactants: behavior change extends temporally beyond the period of interaction; social interaction is a sufficient but not necessary condition for development of the behavior pattern of interest. Such behavioral transmission results, in most cases, from the introduction of one organism by another into a stimulus situation to which the first organism is predisposed to respond in a specific fashion. Social transmission processes serve to facilitate the rapid acquisition of adaptive responses by naive animals. The mechanisms by means of which weanling wild rats acquire the learned feeding preferences of adult colony members are discussed in terms of the preceding analysis of social transmission processes.