Social foraging: individual learning and cultural transmission of innovations

We present two stochastic models of individual and social learningthat count the number of individuals exhibiting a learned, resource-producingtrait in a group of social foragers. The novelty of our modelingresults from incorporating the empirically based assumptionthat rates of both individual and social learning should dependon the frequency of the learned trait within the group. Whenresources occur as clumps shared by group members, a naive individual'sacquisition of the skill required for clump discovery/productionshould involve opposing processes of frequency dependence. Theopportunity to learn via cultural transmission should increasewith the trait's frequency, but the opportunity for learningindividually should decrease as the trait's frequency increases.The results of the model suggest that the evolution of the capacityfor cultural transmission may be promoted in environments wherescrounging at resource clumps inhibits rates of individual learning.