Luc-Alain Giraldeau

Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique | INRS

This chapter reviews some of the approaches and methods used to study the adaptive function of behavior. It looks at how adaptation can be studied by formulating quantitative hypotheses about function using backward engineering and simple optimality models. The chapter introduces version of the optimality approach, evolutionary game theory and its...

European ethologists emphasized that animal behavior is a biological phenomenon, and as such a product of evolution. The emphasis of the North American psychologists on learning was epitomized by the rise of behaviorism in the 1930s. Within experimental psychology there came a reaction to behaviorism in what we call cognitive psychology. Niko Tinbe...

Recent studies have emphasized the role of social learning and cultural transmission in promoting conformity and uniformity in animal groups, but little attention has been given to the role of negative frequency-dependent learning in impeding conformity and promoting diversity instead. Here, we show experimentally that under competitive conditions...

Behavioural plasticity can be costly, but is advantageous when it allows animals to adjust their behaviour to current conditions. Since individual differences in learning ability could be a source of differences in behavioural plasticity, the frequency dependence of payoffs within a foraging group may permit the coexistence of both plastic, fast-le...

This study investigated whether young children's conformity to a consensus varies across the normative domain and age. A total of 168 3- and 5-year-olds participated. Each child was presented with a puzzle box that had two transparent compartments. In a reward preference condition, one of the compartments contained 1 sticker, whereas the other comp...

In behavioral ecology, the behavioral consequences of individuals (exploiters) using the investments of others (investors), rather than investing time or effort in procuring a resource themselves, has been traditionally studied using the producer–scrounger (PS) model—a simple evolutionary game theoretic model in which producers (investors) search f...

Renewable resources have the potential to be used sustainably but typically are not, often due to the existence of exploiters or free riders. This chapter analyzes free-riding behavior using the prisoner’s dilemma-based public goods model and the producer–scrounger model. Overuse of renewable resources is examined under four investor–exploiter scen...

The effect of model reliability on children’s choices to learn socially versus individually is pertinent to theories addressing cultural evolution and theories of selective trust. Here the effect of a reliable versus unreliable model on children’s preferences to learn socially or individually was examined, as well as their subsequent imitation on a...

Culture evolution requires both modification and faithful replication of behaviour, thus it is essential to understand how individuals choose between social and asocial learning. In a quasi-experimental design, 3-and 5-year-olds (176), and adults (52) were presented individually with two novel artificial fruits, and told of the apparatus’ relative...

The use of evolutionary game theory and the concept of the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) have come under criticism lately because game-theoretic models are often constrained to overly simplistic situations. Furthermore, game-theoretic models commit the behavioural gambit, that is, they assume that individuals have some unspecified decision m...

This special issue of Behavioural Processes is dedicated to the contributions of Jerry A. Hogan to behavioural biology—or ‘ethology’ as this field used to be known. These contributions are manifold, and have inspired many researchers, not only in ethology, but also in experimental psychology and behavioural neuroscience, as can be seen from the dif...

Animal decision making in frequency-dependent situations, where the payoff of an action depends on the actions of others, has gained prominence in behavioural ecology and in social foraging in particular. One such situation involves cases where an animal can search for a new resource (produce) or join what others have already found (scrounge). A nu...

Individuals from the same population generally vary in suites of correlated behavioral traits: personality. Yet, the strength of the behavioral correlations sometimes differs among populations and environmental conditions, suggesting that single underlying mechanisms, such as genetic constraints, cannot account for them. We propose, instead, that s...

Investigating the evolution of consistent between-individual behavioral differences necessitates to explain the emergence of within-individual consistency. Relying on a recent mathematical model, we here test the prediction that the emergence of differences in within-individual consistency is related to the sequential access to resources in a frequ...

Animals foraging in groups commonly respond to the presence of others by increasing their foraging rate, an increase that could come at the expense of prey detection accuracy. Yet the existence and consequences of such so-called 'speed-accuracy trade-offs' in group-foraging animals remain unexplored. We used group-feeding zebra finches, Taeniopygia...

Behavioral ecologists have long been comfortable assuming that genetic architecture does not constrain which phenotypes can evolve (the "phenotypic gambit"). For flexible behavioral traits, however, solutions to adaptive problems are reached not only by genetic evolution but also by behavioral changes within an individual's lifetime, via psychologi...

Individuals foraging in groups can use two different tactics for obtaining food resources. Individuals can either search for food sources themselves (producing) or they can join food discoveries of others (scrounging). In this study we use a genetic algorithm in a spatially explicit producer-scrounger game to explore how individuals compromise betw...

Results of model-based cluster analysis investigating polymorphism in scrounging and boldness. (DOCX)

Visualization of five runs of the genetic algorithm showing producers and scroungers in the foraging environment. (MOV)

Legend for Movie S1. (DOCX)

Bird colonies are potentially rich sources of social information that can be used to compensate for the numerous disadvantages of communal life. This information can reduce uncertainty about nest locations, mates or food sources. However, there is little empirical evidence that colonies can actually serve as an information exchange point. We asked...

Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for the adaptive evolution of personality, defined as inter-individual differences in behaviour that are consistent over time and across situations. For instance, the ‘pace-of-life syndrome’ hypothesis suggests that personality evolved as a behavioural correlate of life-history trajectories that vary...

Although natural selection should have favoured individuals capable of adjusting the weight they give to personal and social information according to circumstances, individuals generally differ consistently in their individual weighting of both types of information. Such individual differences are correlated with personality traits, suggesting that...

When they forage in groups, animals can search for their own food (producer tactic) or exploit the discoveries of others (scrounger tactic). Previous experimental inquiries have demonstrated that individuals vary in their tendency to play either tactic but the extent to which individual factors influence variation in foraging behavior are little st...

Every day humans face choices, whether shopping for coffee beans or voting for a representative. Economists usually assume that we are rational agents who consistently choose options with the greatest utility. Yet, there are numerous departures from rational choice. People often justify continued investment in an unprofitable option because they ha...

Whether contextual information is helpful in making decisions depends on the situation.

Consistent individual differences in behaviour have now been documented in a broad range of organisms over a variety of contexts. However, individual differences in social contexts have received less attention. We explored the consistency and temporal persistence of individual differences in tactic use in a producer-scrounger foraging game using tw...

Recent evidence strongly suggests that natural selection can favour the evolution of consistent individual differences in behaviour (‘personalities’). Indeed, personality shows heritable variation and has been linked to fitness in many species. However, the fitness effects of personality are highly variable within and between species. Furthermore,...

It is well known that increasing the ambient temperature increases the metabolic rate and consequently, the foraging rate of most insects. However, temperature experienced during the immature stages of insects affects their adult size (an inverse relationship). Because body size is generally correlated to foraging success, we hypothesized that temp...

Research on social learning has focused traditionally on whether animals possess the cognitive ability to learn novel motor patterns from tutors. More recently, social learning has included the use of others as sources of inadvertent social information. This type of social learning seems more taxonomically widespread and its use can more readily be...

Small flocks (20–40 individuals) of feral rock doves (Columba livia) studied in downtown Montréal follow a bimodal daily schedule of feeding site attendance. The bimodal schedule is achieved through a summation of different usage schedules in the various areas of the sites. The latter schedules are not necessarily bimodal and reveal clear differenc...

Successful foraging is essential for survival and reproductive success. In many bird species, foraging is a learned behaviour. To cope with environmental change and survive periods in which regular foods are scarce, the ability to solve novel foraging problems by learning new foraging techniques can be crucial. Although females have been shown to p...

Behavioural decisions in a social context commonly have frequency-dependent outcomes and so require analysis using evolutionary game theory. Learning provides a mechanism for tracking changing conditions and it has frequently been predicted to supplant fixed behaviour in shifting environments; yet few studies have examined the evolution of learning...

When animals forage in groups, they can search for food themselves (producer tactic), or they can search for opportunities to exploit the food discoveries of others (scrounger tactic). Both theoretical and empirical work have shown that group-level use of these alternative tactics is influenced by environmental conditions including group size and f...

When engaged in behavioural games, animals can adjust their use of alternative tactics until groups reach stable equilibria. Recent theory on behavioural plasticity in games predicts that individuals should differ in their plasticity or responsiveness and hence in their degree of behavioural adjustment. Moreover, individuals are predicted to be con...

When group size increases, animals from a wide range of taxa reduce vigilance and increase feeding rate, the so-called group size effect. This effect requires that group members display plastic behavioral responses both in terms of vigilance and foraging to obtain the security benefit from grouping and/or to cope with feeding competition. Most stud...

When animals live in groups, individuals can invest in resources themselves or exploit the investments of other group members. Grouping with kin may reduce the frequency of exploitation because kin selection should favor individuals that imposed fewer costs on their kin. However, taking into account the gains of the exploited individual, allowing k...

Three hypotheses can account for consistent foraging specializations across individuals: (1) food source variation, (2) phenotypic differences and (3) frequency-dependent choice. We examined which explanation was more relevant for flocks of spice finches (Lonchura punctulata) exploiting environments where food could be obtained using two different...

Although many group-foraging models assume that all individuals search for and share their food equally, most documented instances of group foraging exhibit specialized use of producer and scrounger strategies. In addition, many of the studies have focused on groups with strong individual asymmetries exploiting food that is not easily divisible. In...

Models of prey choice in depleting patches predict an expanding specialist strategy: Animals should start as specialists on the most profitable prey and then at some point during patch exploitation switch to a generalist foraging strategy. When patch residence time is long, the switch to a generalist diet is predicted to occur earlier than when pat...

Animal decision making is influenced by past experience in many biological contexts such as mating, avoiding predators, and foraging. In behavioral games, what constitutes a good or bad decision about which alternative to use depends on the behavior of other individuals. Solutions to games can take the form of a stable equilibrium frequency (SEF) o...

When animals forage socially, individuals can obtain prey from their own searching (producer tactic) or by using the behaviour of others (scrounger tactic) when it provides inadvertent social information (ISI) that food has been located. This ISI may either indicate the location of food (social information, SI), or it may indicate the quality of th...

Altruistic anti-predatory behaviours pose an evolutionary problem because they are costly to the actor and beneficial to the recipients. Altruistic behaviours can evolve through indirect fitness benefits when directed toward kin. The altruistic nature of anti-predatory behaviours is often difficult to establish because the actor can obtain direct f...

The cognitive mechanisms by which an organism comes to employ an optimal response to a situation are of great interest in behavioural ecology, but the basis and form of these mechanisms have been little studied. One approach employs learning rules, which are mathematical expressions that calculate the value of the behavioural alternatives in an org...

Animals sample their surrounding environment to collect information, which can be obtained personally or by tracking the behavior of others (i.e., social information). Although social information appears to be generally advantageous, it can also be detrimental and may even conflict with personal information. We tested the effect that the strength o...

The use of video playbacks may provide a promising technique for the study of social behaviour because it allows experimenters to present a diverse set of behavioural patterns while precisely controlling what the observer experiences. However, in order to validate this technique for social foraging contexts, we must first show that video playbacks...

Humans and other animals do not use social learning indiscriminately, rather, natural selection has favoured the evolution of social learning rules that make selective use of social learning to acquire relevant information in a changing environment. We present a gene-culture coevolutionary analysis of a small selection of such rules (unbiased socia...

Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) theory predicts the number of animals choosing habitats of differing quality. Most experimental tests of the IFD have been conducted at small spatial scales (i.e. smaller than maximum daily movement of animals) by comparing the number of animals foraging at adjacent food patches of different quality. Urban pigeons (Col...

Social foragers can alternate between searching for food (producer tactic), and searching for other individuals that have located food in order to join them (scrounger tactic). Both tactics yield equal rewards on average, but the rewards generated by producer are more variable. A dynamic variance-sensitive foraging model predicts that social forage...

When foraging group sizes increase, animals generally decrease the time devoted to antipredator detection and increase their foraging rate, the commonly reported group size effect. The increased foraging rate is thought to follow from increased safety from predators because as group size increases, more eyes are available to detect predators and th...

Cited By (since 1996): 5, Export Date: 12 April 2011, Source: Scopus

A large number of social interactions whether cooperative or exploitative revolve around foraging, whether social insects provisioning the communal nest or vampire bats regurgitating blood meals to a companion when needed. Research on animal cooperation, for instance, has often resorted to food rewards as a means of studying the behavioral rules th...

In species with mate choice, the choosy sex selects its mate based on traits that are thought to indicate the mate's quality. In several bird species, females prefer males that sing more complex songs but it is unclear which aspect of male quality is signalled by this trait. Here we tested the hypothesis that a male's song complexity conveys inform...

Optimal diet theory often fails to predict a forager's diet choice when prey are mobile. Because they escape or defend themselves, mobile prey are likely to increase the forager's handling time, thereby decreasing its fitness gain rate. Many animals have been shown to select their prey so as to maximize either their fitness gain or their fitness ga...

Group-foraging animals can either search for their food (producer) or search for opportunities to join the food discoveries of others (scrounger). To maximize food returns, producers should distance themselves from potential competitors whereas scroungers should increase proximity to potential producers. We investigated the extent to which playing...

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Solitary predators respond to cryptic prey by adopting counterstrategies such as forming a search image or reducing their search rate. However, the response of group-foraging individuals to cryptic prey remains poorly studied. We investigated the effect of the presence of an experienced or a naïve conspecific on the ability of nutmeg mannikins, Lon...

The central place foraging model predicts the optimal load sizes of prey carried back to a central place. When the rate of prey loading at the patch declines with time spent in the patch, the optimal, rate-maximizing load sizes increase with round-trip travel times between patch and central place. Numerous tests of this rate-maximizing currency hav...

When animals forage in groups, individuals can search for food themselves (producer tactic) or they can search for and join other individuals that have located food (scrounger tactic). The scrounger tactic may provide greater antipredator benefits than the producer tactic because "scroungers" hop with their heads up and tend to occupy central posit...

Many animals share food, that is, to tolerate competitors at a defensible clump. Most accounts of resource sharing invoke special evolutionary processes or ecological circumstances that reduce their generality. Surprisingly, the Hawk–Dove game has been unable to address in a simple and general way why so many group foraging animals share food. We m...

We argue that the operational definition proposed by Ramsey et al. does not represent a significant improvement for students of innovation, because it is so restrictive that it might actually prevent the testing of hypotheses on the relationships between innovation, ecology, evolution, culture, and intelligence. To avoid tautological thinking, we n...

Producer--scrounger (PS) game-theoretical foraging models make predictions about the decision of group-feeding animals either to look for food (produce) or for opportunities to exploit the discoveries of other foragers (scrounge). We report the most complete demonstration to date of the applicability of the PS foraging game in a free-living animal,...

The integration of behavioral and population ecology is necessary when behavior both feeds into demographic parameters and depends on population parameters. We show that scrounging behavior, the exploitation of others’ resources, can affect both demographic parameters and population dynamics, including the stability of interactions with prey. Scrou...

Eastern chipmunks are thought to be rate-maximizing central place (CP) foragers because several experimental tests have provided qualitative support for the prediction that their load sizes increase with distance between patch and burrow. Confidence in this conclusion is tainted by the fact that chipmunks always collect loads that are considerably...

A number of group foragers are known to engage in a producer-scrounger (PS) foraging game in which only individuals in the producer strategy search for food; the scroungers wait for opportunities to join. Prey exploited by predators engaged in a PS game could gain by evolving predator evasion tactics that shift the PS equilibrium of their predators...

Interference ideal free distribution (IFD) models predict animal distributions across resource patches, taking into account the effects of resource density and competitor interference on an individual's resource intake rate. Assuming that individuals behave to maximize fitness, foragers should aggregate at patches of high resource abundance when in...

Several species use the number of young produced as public information (PI) to assess breeding site quality. PI is inaccessible for synchronously breeding birds because nests are empty by the time the young can collect this information. We investigate if location cues are the next best source of inadvertent social information (ISI) used by young pr...