Highlights•Animals regularly use social information (SI) to find resources or avoid threats.•It
is not always clear how their ability to use SI is shaped by experience.•We structured …

To forage efficiently in a patchy environment animals must make informed decisions
concerning in which patches to forage, for which the behaviour of other animals often …

Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend
on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been …

In foraging groups, individuals may utilise information from their social environment to aid
decision making when choosing where to search for food. Little work has looked at the costs …

If we are to understand the cognitive basis and evolutionary origins of a particular behaviour,
it is necessary to identify its underlying mechanism. Ninespine sticklebacks (Pungitius …

Elucidating the mechanisms by which animals learn from others is central to understanding
the evolution of behavioral adaptations and the constraints that limit options when gathering …

Animals pay opportunity costs when pursuing one of several mutually exclusive courses of
action. We quantified the opportunity costs of conforming to the behaviour of others in …

Although the opportunity for errors in social learning is widely recognised, as yet little
research has been directed towards understanding specific inaccuracies, biases and …

There is currently considerable interest in the interplay between personal and social
information in decision-making processes. Two experiments are presented exploring the …

Although it is natural to expect that group-living animals will utilize social learning, the
expectation for non-grouping species is less clear. Only a few studies have explored the …