Cognitive Biology Notes

What is Cognitive Biology?

Cognitive Biology is a relatively new field focused on the comparative study of cognition in humans and animals, encompassing all levels from mechanistic to adaptive. It includes both laboratory and field studies and addresses adaptive questions.

Cognitive biology has a broad perspective based on Tinbergen's four questions: development, learning, instinct, and function. The field merges aspects of ethology and cognitive science, prompting a deeper inquiry into the meaning of "cognition."

What is Cognition?

Cognitive processes are defined broadly to include emotion, habit, and rational thought. Distinctions are made between basic (habitual, inflexible) and complex (abstract, flexible) cognition.

Cognition is a continuum of behaviors, from reflexes to complex cognition. Reflexes involve only two neurons: a receptor (sensory neuron) and a motor neuron connected by a single synapse. Complex cognition involves many intervening synapses.

Reflexes should not always be assumed as the default reason for animal behavior, nor should complex cognition be assumed to be always conscious.

Tinbergen's Four Questions

Cognitive Biology addresses all four of Tinbergen's questions:

Mechanism (or causation): What is the mechanism in the organism that makes something possible? What causes the behavior to be performed?
Adaption (or function): Why is the animal performing the behavior? How does the behavior increase the individual's fitness (Darwinian question)?
Ontogeny (or development): How has the behavior developed during the lifetime of the individual? In what way has it been influenced by experience and learning?
Phylogeny (or evolution): How did the behavior evolve? How has natural selection modified the behavior over evolutionary time?

History of Cognitive Biology

Early Work

Charles Darwin's "The Descent of Man" (1871) suggested that the differences in cognition between humans and higher animals are a matter of degree rather than kind, indicating a quantitative difference rather than a qualitative difference. This aligns with evolutionary theory.

George Romanes, a follower of Darwin, sought evidence to understand animal intelligence but relied heavily on anecdotal observations. He also assigned human characteristics to animals, a practice known as anthropomorphism.

Lloyd Morgan advocated for experimental approaches to animal cognition and introduced "Morgan's Canon," which posits that animal behavior should only be interpreted through simpler psychological processes unless higher psychology is necessary applying phylogenetic trees and genetics when defining it.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism, pioneered by figures like John B. Watson, emphasized the study of observable behavior over introspective methods. Edward Thorndike's puzzle box experiments with cats and rats led to the formulation of the Law of Effect, highlighting that rewards strengthen the correct response.

Ivan Pavlov’s work with classical conditioning demonstrated how conditioned stimuli can influence unconditioned (unlearned) responses to become conditioned responses, forming a foundational aspect of animal learning.

B.F. Skinner tried to develop an objective mathematical learning theory, focusing on the "laws" of reinforcement across all species. Skinner developed the Skinner Box, a method to study operant (instrumental) conditioning.

From Behaviorism to Cognitive Science

Psychologists like Edward Tolman began challenging behaviorism by emphasizing the relevance of cognitive maps and private mental phenomena in understanding behavior. In 1960, evidence accumulated against the uniform "laws" of behavior, like the "Garcia Effect," showing species-specific instincts.

Ethology

Ethology emerged as a counter to behaviorism, emphasizing innate learning mechanisms and the heritability of certain behaviors. Key figures such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen contributed foundational concepts like imprinting.

Lorenz’s concept of the “innate schoolarm” suggests that organisms possess an intrinsic knowledge of what is beneficial for their survival. Both concepts show that the acquisition of information from the environment is regulated and occurs when most adaptive.

Instinct

The theory of instincts proposes that complex behaviors, such as fighting and courtship, can be seen as innate biological factors rather than learned responses because they are performed without prior experience.

Innate vs. Learned Debate

The nature versus nurture debate is encapsulated in the work of researchers like Konrad Lorenz and Daniel Lehrman, who argued for genetic versus environmental influences on behavior, respectively. Tinbergen's integrative approach suggested both evolutionary history and development must be considered to understand animal behavior. Today we rather talk about nature via nature.

The Cognitive Revolution

This revolution was boosted by Chomsky's attack on Skinner's ideas about language learning and the realization of the importance of mental aspects.

Research Methods

Cognitive biology integrates various research methods, including field studies and laboratory work, as well as observation and experiments. The comparative method is used due to the diversity of species.

Sensory World

The study of animal umwelten (the perceptual world of an organism) emphasizes how different species uniquely experience their environment.

Evolutionary Neuroscience

Basic Neuroscience

Neurons

Neurons are a cell type found in all animals, except sponges. Neurons work in groups and function essentially the same way across different animals. Neurons are independent cells that maintain electrical charges with $K^+$ (potassium ions) inside and $Na^+$ and $Cl^-$ (sodium and chloride) outside.

Depolarization

When a neuron fires due to stimulation, the charge switches (action potential). Sodium ions ( $Na^+$ ) enter, while potassium ions ( $K^+$ ) exit.

Synaptic Release and Binding

When the action potential reaches the end of the axon, it reaches the synapse. The synapse releases neurotransmitters, which bind to neurotransmitter receptors of the next neuron. Other substances (e.g., drugs, toxins, hormones) can also bind to these receptors.

Different ways to release neurotransmitters

Action potentials:

"all or none"
binary response
typical for neurons

Graded potentials:

"a little here and there"
continuous response
typical for sensory cells

Neurotransmitters

Glutamate: main excitatory transmitter
GABA: main inhibitory transmitter (alcohol enhances)
Acetylcholine (ACh): memory and muscle contractions (nicotine)
Dopamine (DA): reward (cocaine)
Norepinephrine (NE): arousal (amphetamine)
Serotonin (5HT): "gates of perception" (LSD)
Endorphins: pleasure (opium, heroin)
Oxytocin: social bonding

Vertebrates

Every brain has the same parts, but can have different proportions. For example, rats have an excellent sense of smell, hence their olfactory part is bigger than in humans. Marsupials lack a corpus callosum, which is the bridge between the two hemispheres.

Brainstem

A lot of important neurotransmitters come from the brain stem with really long axons.

The Neural Foundations of Learning and Memory

Hebbian Learning

Hebbian learning is the neuronal equivalent to behavioral associative learning. Donald Hebb said: "Neurons that fire together, wire together." This means if Neuron A and Neuron B fire simultaneously, their synapse strengthens, either through increased neurotransmitter release or more postsynaptic receptors.

NMDA

NMDA is a glutamate receptor molecule that implements Hebbian learning. It opens only when glutamate is bound and Cell B fires. The calcium influx leads to long-lasting changes within the cell (e.g., long-term potentiation).

Examples from Vision

Rods and Cones

The retina has rods (sensitive in darkness) and cones (used in daylight). Humans have three cone types: red, green, and blue.

Rhodopsin and Cone Opsins

Cone opsins absorb photons of particular frequencies. All animals have the same basic structure of opsins, but small changes in amino acids can affect light sensitivity and therefore what colours a species can see. Humans have three types of cones, which makes us tricromatic.

Evolution of Color Vision in Vertebrates

Humans and their primate relatives have trichromatic vision, but most mammals have dichromatic vision (blue and green cones). Birds have four to five cone types. Mammals lost two cone types during a nocturnal period, but some primates regained one cone for finding food and as a sexual signal.

The Hippocampus and Spatial Memory

Mammals and birds have a very similar hippocampus, while reptiles have a simplified form. Food-storing birds have a larger hippocampus. London taxi drivers have a larger posterior hippocampus (spatial memory) than non-taxi drivers.

Place Neurons and Grid Cells

Place neurons help to remember where certain things happened or are, while grid cells give a cartesian view of the space. Both together help to map an entire space.

Animal Communication

Tinbergen's Four Questions

Function (or adaption): Why is the animal performing the behaviour?
Evolution (or phylogeny): How did the behaviour evolve?
Causation (or mechanism): What causes the behaviour to be performed?
Development (or ontogeny): How has the behaviour developed during the lifetime of the individual?

To understand something, answers for all four questions are needed.

Examples of Animal Communication

Animal communication often involves multiple modalities simultaneously.

Chemical Communication

Even single-cell organisms communicate chemically. Slime mold communicates through chemicals, forming complex multicellular life when hungry. Ants lay down trails with smell. Pheromones are also chemical communication.

Vibrational Communication

Some spiders use their web for communication. Orb weaver females have males pluck the strings for mating. Funnel spiders sense the size of possible enemies through vibrations on their webs.

Auditory Communication

Red deer roar higher to attract females and deeper to scare away males, because the females prefer the higher sounds. Vervet monkeys have different alarm calls for different predators. Túngara frogs whine and chuck to attract females and avoid bats.

Visual Communication

Bees perform waggle dances to inform other bees where food is. Peacocks dance, wiggle their feathers, spread them and sing to impress females. Gazelles are stotting to indicate their fitness to predators and discourage it from chasing them.

Plant Communication

Flowers communicate with pollinators, signaling that they have nectar and pollen for reproduction.

Are These Communication Systems "Animal Languages"?

By the most common lingual definition, animal communication isn't a language. Linguists define language as a complex faculty that allows us to express any of our thoughts, feelings and experiences. Animals can have a lot of concepts but can turn only some of the into a limited range of mostly innate signals.

Is the Honeybee Dance a Language?

Bees map the location of flowers, water, or new hive spots through their dancing. They know if things are the same or different. But since bees can't dance about the sameness, or even about colors or lines, their way of communicatings isn't considered a language.

Animal Communication from Tinbergen's Four Perspectives

Phylogeny: The Evolution of Signals

The phylogeny was studied using the comparative method. Female túngara frogs love the chuck sounds because low frequency chucks stimulate parts of the frogs ear.

Ontogeny: Vocal Learning of Various Sorts

In cross-fostering experiments primates still performed the calls typical of their species, but the foster mothers understood them better than other. About half of the bird species, are vocal learners and can imitate mostly birds of the same kind.

Vocal Learning in Songbirds

All songbird species are vocal learners, but some of them are close-ended learners (learn only during a critical period) and others are open-ended learners (learn their entire life). Zebra finches are close-ended learners that go through a sensory stage (hearing the song) and a sensorimotor stage (learning to produce it). the stages are called plastic song and their finalized song as an adult is called crystallized song. Young males seek out adults who sing to them because it is intrinsically pleasurable due to dopamine release. It functions by atraccting and repellling each other through the song.

Zebra finches learn the song of the same species. During a territoriality experiment birds were stopped from singing. The reasearch showed that the tested birds territories were invaded, proving the song functions as a repellent. Femals find a large repertiore very atractive.

Mechanism: How Are Signals Produced?

Research on birds revealed the functions of brain areas like RA (motor cortex), X (basal ganglia), and HVc (higher vocal center),

Knowledge About the Physical World

How do animals use information about the physical world?
Spatial, numerical and physical cognition involve domain-specific and domain-general processes.
domain general: memory, learning
domain specific: spatial behaviour involves aquiring vector like information (distances and directions)

Not Getting Lost

Most mobile animals face the same problem: food/sources are separated from places of refuge and it is important to be avle to travels between them without wandering randomly.

Navigation is the ability to organize behavior adaptively to move from one place to another. This ability occurred early in evolution and occurs in all mobile species. At the simplest level navigation may only requires to move towards or away from a stimulus.

Spatial Orientation

How to get to the goal:
- taxis:
  - phototaxis: moving towards or away from the light
  - chemotaxis: moving towards odor cues
  - ecotaxis: gravity
  - rheotaxis: moving in relation to water current
- following others
- magnetic cues

Some representation of the goal (nest, food, mate) is needed, either a location or how to get to it. This representation is created or used in the outside world.

Chemical Trail

E. niger chemical trails are a very effective group decision process where ants finds the shortest trail to a foodsource. Ant C decides to follow the ant with the more frequent pheromones.

Aquire and Use of Spatial Information

Spatial informations are distance and direction, which mathematically are a vector or shape information. The information of the own position is in relation to the goal. Independent information about direction (compass) is ideal.

Long and Short Distance Orientation

Long distance migration

This phenomenon is mainly studied in birds and relies on genetic programmes (direction of migration). Birds use and combine the directional information from sun, earths magnetic field, chemical cues, landmarks and stars and follow others. They leran from one migration to the next. If adult birds sudenly don't have their sense of smell anymore they behave like juvenile birds, while the losing of magnetic receptors doen't affect them. White crowndes sparrows got deplaced from west to east, while adults corrected for the displacement, juveniles did not.

Calibration of genetic predisposition with experience

Many birds migrate at night, which means the primary directional cues for the nocturnal migrants are the Earth’s magnetic field and the stars but the pattern of stars varies with geographic location, time of night and time of year. Even hand raised birds, held in cages exhibit “Zugunruhe”.

Emlen funnel

The Emlen funnel is a circular cage with the top covered by a glass or wire-screen. The orientation behaviour of the bird inside the cage is studied quantitatively using the distribution of marks that the bird leaves on the walls of the cage.

Population specific genetic programmes

Some species change direction mid journey to avoid inhospitable places on their migration (Alps, Sahara). This happens through population specific genetic programmes that specify the duration of migratory restlessness and its direction with respect to the magnetic field. In some species juveniles learn from adults, which has to be considered in reintroduction programmes.

Short Distance Navigation

Desert ants

The foraging desert ant returns to the nest using dead reckoning and path integration. The direction comes from the sun (or polarised light).

Death reckoning and path integration

Animals use dead reckoning to estimate their current location based on their movements from their last known location. They can use cues to track distance and direction in order to estimate their position, and hence how to get home. This process was named path integration. If an ant is catched just before it is on its homeward journey and relesaed several meters away, it doesn't head for the nest but takes a parralel path to the one it would have originally taken. The ant must have performed path integration on the outward journey.

The sun compass

Desert ants can use the sun and patterns of polarized light it creates for directional information. To use the compass animals need a representation of the local ephemeris function and an internal clock. If a bee is trained to find food in a certain position at 9am but gets released at 6am it can take the different sun position into account.

Sense of direction in mammals

Mammals changes in angular orientation is processed by the vestibular system which senses and changes accelerations and decelerations above a certain treshold.

Computing distance

Bees and ants have mechanisms for measuring the travelled distance, for example visual cues or for ants their number of steps. Bees measure optical flow, the motion and angle of images that pass the eye during movement. Dead reckoning is egocentric spatial localisation which means it is locating goals with respect to itself and the allocentric frame of reference are landmarks or environmental geometry.

Navigation Environmental Cues

Proximal vs distal Cues

Animals use both, proximal and distal cues, depending on availability.

Beacons

Beacons aren't inherently spatial but animals are drawn to them. Beacons have a drawback because they have to be within visual range of the goal.

Landmarks

If the goal is not visible, animals have to use other objects with fixed locations.

Tinbergen's famous experiment

Tinbergen found out, that wasps prefer landmarks that are large, nearby and three-dimensional, which makes ecological sense. Morris placed a rat on a small, dry, black platform (beacon), in a circular pool. The wall contained signs (landmarks). There also was a transparent, submerged platform. Landmarks and beacons therefore demand different kinds of cognitive processing.

How are landmarks used to estimate distance?

Bees are trained to find food in a particular location in a lab with an array of landmarks and find them, even if those landmarks change size. While a single beacon (single symmetrical landmark) indicates only the distance to the goal, but not the direction, two landmarks unambiguoously specify a single position and multiple landmarks make up redundant information. Some animals will only learn one of several available landmarks.

Weber's Law

$Weber's Law$ is an important biophysical principle that Describes the just noticeable difference (JND) between two stimuli, which accounts for 5%.

Routes

Animals record the movements they make in travelling between two places. This is called egocentric orientation. It consists of response learning and stimulus response.

Navigation Mechanisms

Animals have different navigational skills, but the skills differ between species. Most animals dispose of several mechanisms. Specific locations can be identified by animals in a variety of ways. Some navigation mechanisms are used in parallel and some in hierarchical order.

Backups

Dead reckoning is a basic wide spread mechanism that is often running in the background, and therefore available as a backup. Implicitly dead reckoning is used in identifiying a landmark in the first place.

Summary allocentric reference systems

Allocentric reference systems help locating a goal with respect to the environment:

beacons: located immediately by the goal
landmarks: two or multiple
Route learning means animals record the movement they make in travelling between two places.

Summary methods

train animals on beacons or landmarks
change positions or size of landmarks
remove them
animals trained to find goal with two landmarks
one or more landmarks are moved
increase distance

The Hippocampus

The hippocampus belongs to the limbic system and plays an important role in the consolidation of information from short- term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation. Species or individuals that rely on spatial memory have a larger hippocampus and therefore better spatial memory.

Place learning vs. response learning

If a rat is placed in a maze with a place and a response, the place learning is evident in early acquisition, but later the habitual response prevails.

Place cells

Place cells fire, when an animal relocates a familiar place. Specific locations can be identified by animals in a variety of ways. Place cells show an increased frequency of firing, when an animal is in a specific area referred to as the cell's place field. The firing rate increase can go from virtually zero outside the field to as much as 100 Hz (for brief periods) in the middle of the place field.

Mental Maps

What is a cognitive map?

Cognitive maps encode distance and directions to enable mental operations to them. Distance and direction are the metric properties of space. It is an arial view or plan of the space that preserves distances and directions among an infinity of locations. But it is important to consider simpler mechanisms how animals find their ways to goals.

Complex level

The complex levels means the formation of complex internal representations of the environment, the subjects position within it, locations of the goals, various routes from the current position to these goals and possible obstacles in the way.

Detour studies

First the animal is shown a goal, which is then placed behind a barrier some distance away. If the animal selects the correct shortest route to the goal, then this may be because they possess a cognitive map.

Sex differences in spatial navigation in humans

Men and women had to learn a route in a fictional town and then trace a novel route through the town. Males made fever errors and required fewer trials to learn the novel route than females did.

Navigation and testosteron

It is hypothesized, that sex hormones have an important role in both establishing and maintaining sex difference. The group with testosterone had improved representations of the directions within the environment and performed significantly better on the mental rotation task, but the navigation success and strategy were similar in both groups.

Technical Intelligence and Tool Use

Animals interact with the environment and have to learn how to extract prey, capture prey, construct nests as well as burrows and use tools. Researchers of the ecological approach want to understand how animals process physical information and see if animals that face technical challenges show cognitive adaptions. The anthropocentric approach focusses on the question if cognitive abilities of humans and animals are on a continuum.

Definition of tool use

Tool use is casually relating two or more objects that are external to one's own body. Tool use also is the manipulation of an object, that is not part of the own body in order to change the form or position of another object.

Tooling framework

This is definition is an action focused concept. Mechanical interface included in the tooling definition:

raking
probing
dipping
cutting
hammering
scratching
wiping

Excluded in the tooling definition but still tool use:

prob-and-climb
dropping
transporting
placing
throwing

Extending tooling theory

Body-plus-object systems are created when acting with a tool, because the body schema extends. Spatial relations More relations, need more cognitive abilities.

Types of spatial relations:

number of relations
frame of reference (allocentric or egocentric)
temporal order (sequential or concurrent)
temporal dynamics (static or dynamic)
specifity (placement, orientation or alignment)

Concurrent tool use

The simultaneous use of two or more unattached tools to achieve an outcome.

Sequential tool use

Sequential tool use is defined as using a tool to obtain another non-food object which subsequently will serve as a tool to act upon a further goal.

What do tool users know about the function of the tool?

In an experiment with birds it was studied wether they choose the right tool by random chance. It shows that they do this deliberately since they had it right in the first try.

What are the most common physical problems animals have to solve when using tools?

Problems that animals have to learn or understand to use tools include the problem of contact and other things like suitability of the tool (lenght, diameter, weight, rigidity). Transfer tasks Transfer tasks have the same problem or underlying principle, but different perceptual features.

Morgang's canon

In no case is an animal acitivity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. This means if there is a simple and a more complicated explanation, it is best to go with the simpler one.

How can the underlying mechanism be investigated?

Only experimental work can explain which underlying mechanisms are involved and if their comprehension of physical causality.

Naive (folk) physics

Some researchers claim neither apes nor humans need to know anything about notions of force or direction of the tools they use, they rather use concrete or practical ways of understanding physical principles.

Ontogeny

No behaviour has exclusively learned or innate components.

Social learning

Model modifies behaviour in presence of others and derives no immeadiate benefits and costs, wile observers aqcuire skills more rapidly or efficiently than they would otherwise.

Tool-use is costly and increases the time woodpeckers need to get their prey. To answer the question, if tool use has evolved in conjunction with enhanced cognitive abilities, the comparative method is used.

Behavioural Innovations in Animals and Humans

Innovation is a product and a process in order to produce a new behaviour variant in the population. Innovation can also be defined as the discovery of a new behavioural interaction with the social or physical environment, tapping into an existing opportunity or creating a new opportunity.

Intraspecific variation in innovativeness

For animals problem solving tasks are used.

Interspecific variation in innovativeness

Ecological drivers for innovativeness: occupation of harsh and changing environments, diet generalism and habital generalism

Innovation

There is one species of finches who live on different islands with different food sources and adapted to that (lineage diversification). Innovation counts correlate positively with lineage diversification. Invasion into new environments is also related to innovation.

Phases of an innovative process

Exploration

Motivational systems for explorations are neophilia, driven by the benefits of exploration and neophobia, driven by the costs of exploration as well as non-conformity and risk taking.

Play

Play helps with the discovery of novel interactions with the environment as well as allowing to bridge unrewarded steps in an innovation process.

Social transmission

Social transmission can be local enhancement, stimulus enhancement, emulation or imitation. This simply means things get improved from generation to generation, like the wheel. This ability seems to be limited to humans.

Model modifies their behaviour and derives no immeadiate benefits and costs. Those traits are very limited in animals.

Exploitation of an adjacent opportunity

It helps to know and understand a lot about the innovation (e.g. to create more uses).

Production of an opportunity

An example is the use of fire as a turning point in human evolution, when they learned to control the fire.
Aspects that determine effects on fitness:

multiplication of opportunity
importance of the resource
number of innovations within a population
level of diffusion into the population
generalizability of application

In essence, tool innovations can include the design and construction of new tools, discovery of faverable interaction and Reaching adjacent opportunity.

Social Relations

Ecological vs. social challenges

A social challenge can be fights for food or defending food from rivals. The Social intelligence hypothesis suggests that dealing with the challenges of complex social life requires sophisticated cognitive abilities.

Types of social complexity

In primates, the size of the neocortex correlates with average group size, but problems of defining "group" can occur through structured subgroups and a high degree of fission-fusion dynamics. Social relationships are the content, quality, and pattern of interactions among individuals over time.

Types of social interactions

Animals can show aggression to establish dominance through agonistic behaviour and affiliation meaning social bonds through socio-positive behaviour.

Social networks and competence

Individuals are embedded in a network of social relationships, called social field or social structure. Being socially competent means having strong or many relationships.

Social competence is linked to significant fitness benefits, such as increased offspring survival in the first year. Long- term bonds may also correlate with increased relative brain size, with the degree of variation in spatial cohesion and individual membership in a group changing over time.

Essential cognitive skills for social life

Individual recognition and different types of that
Memory for relationships
Third-party recognition Making
use of third-parties (Coalition or Alliance)
Manipulating others' relationships

Cooperation and Competition

Social knowledge enables animals to predict each other’s behaviour but is also actively affecting other's behaviour. Social manipulation is the proactive use of social knowledge and can help to achieve a "common goal" (cooperation) or prevent others from interfering in one's own goal (deception).

Defining cooperation

Cooperation ist costly for all participants. This results in cases of mutualism where the cooperation immediately benefits all participants and cases of reciprocal altruism where the payoff is delayed.

Cognitive requirements

Cooperation can be based on basic parts like paying attention and remembering each other or more sophisticated skills such as an understanding of the need for partnership. Comparing the different species results lead to arisesing methodological and cognitive differences.
Equity concerns: Sense of fairness and an other-regarding concern can also be a factor.

Examples

Non-human animals often solve problems on a mutualistic basis and try to understand each others needs. This behavior highly depends on the context.

Defining decepetion in animals

The animal has to provide no or false information, benefits itself but costs the receiver. Methods include collecting anecdotes and focus experiments on whether animals prevent others from doing something rather than preventing them from knowing.

Studying Deception: by using a Selectively Informed Foragers the research can investigate if subordinate individuals might learn to lead a dominant away from food. In Competition over Food Caches animals learn to conceal information about cache locations. Counter-deception is also seen in decepetive actions is likely to be an individual behavior.

Social Learning and Tradition

Social learning is about how individuals acquire information from others and how this can lead to the persistence of behaviours across groups and generations (traditions). Defining social learning Different types of social learning likely involve

different cognitive mechanisms. Acquisition rests primarily on the individual who needs the information. Active teaching by skilled individuals is rare. Social learning is taxonomically widespread and offers a cheap way of acquiring information.Adaptive value and transmission:

Adaptive Value and Transmission

Social learning is not automatically fitness-enhancing or adaptive. Various social learning strategies (state-based, frequency-dependent, model-based) exist, leading to biased information transmission and different behaviours between groups. Social learning is mostly considered socially biased individual learning that spreads by active teaching over generations.

Cognitive Types of Social Learning

Motivational level (e.g., contagion, social facilitation)
Perceptual level (enhancement)
Associative level (observational conditioning) Emulation
Learning about actions or their consequences (higher cognitive function). Imitation Copying the behaviour itself.