Social transmission of information about multiflavored foods

We fed demonstrator rats diets made by adding three, four, or five different flavorants to powdered Purina Rat Chow. We then allowed each of these demonstrator rats to interact with a naive observer rat for 30 min. We found that (1) observers exhibited enhanced preferences for many of the individual flavorants in the multiflavored diets that their respective demonstrators had eaten and (2) the probability of an observer exhibiting enhanced preference for an individual flavorant in its demonstrator’s diet decreased as the number of flavorants in that diet increased. In Experiment 2, the individual members of pairs of subjects were each fed one of two different four-flavored diets. The subjects in each pair interacted for 30 min, then each chose between two single-flavored diets. One of these single-flavored diets contained a flavorant in the four-flavored food that a subject had itself eaten; the other single-flavored diet contained a flavorant in the four-flavored diet that a subject’s partner had eaten. The subjects showed enhanced preferences for six of eight flavorants in the four-flavored diets that their respective partners had eaten.