Abstract：
Social learning is beneficial in almost every domain of a social animal\'s life, but it is particularly important in the context of predation and foraging. In both contexts, social animals tend to produce acoustically distinct vocalizations, alarms, and food calls, which have remained somewhat of an evolutionary conundrum as they appear to be costly for the signaller. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that food calls function to direct others toward novel food items, using a playback experiment on a group of chimpanzees. We showed chimpanzees novel (plausibly edible) items while simultaneously playing either conspecific food calls or acoustically similar greeting calls as a control. We found that individuals responded by staying longer near items previously associated with food calls even in the absence of these vocalizations, and peered more at these items compared with the control items, provided no conspecifics were nearby. We also found that once chimpanzees had access to both item types, they interacted more with the one previously associated with food calls than the control items. However, we found no evidence of social learning per se. Given these effects, we propose that food calls may gate and thus facilitate social learning by directing listeners\' attention to new feeding opportunities, which if integrated with additional cues could ultimately lead to new food preferences within social groups.
摘要：
社会学习在社会动物生活的几乎每一个领域都是有益的，但在捕食和觅食的背景下尤为重要。在这两种情况下，社交动物往往会产生声学上不同的发声，警报,和食物的呼唤，这在某种程度上仍然是一个进化难题，因为它们对信号员来说似乎是昂贵的。这里,我们研究了这样一个假设，即食物调用功能可以引导其他人转向新的食物，用一组黑猩猩的回放实验。我们向黑猩猩展示了新颖的（合理可食用的）物品，同时播放特定的食物呼叫或声音相似的问候呼叫作为对照。我们发现，即使没有这些发声，人们的反应也是在以前与食物电话相关的物品附近停留更长的时间，与对照项目相比，对这些项目的观察更多，前提是附近没有特定物种。我们还发现，一旦黑猩猩获得了这两种物品类型，他们与以前与食物调用相关的一个交互比控制项更多。然而,我们没有发现社会学习本身的证据。鉴于这些影响，我们建议食物呼叫可以通过引导听众注意新的喂养机会来促进社会学习，如果与其他线索相结合，最终可能会导致社会群体内部的新食物偏好。
