Social and Ecological Pathways in the Evolution of Learning Strategies: Insights from Primates and Beyond

Understanding how animals acquire complex behaviors requires bridging ecological, cognitive, and social perspectives. In this seminar, I will first share findings from my research on wild gibbons, where I examined how immature individuals balance asocial and social learning, and selectively choose whom to learn from, particularly when facing ecological challenges such as foraging complexity. Building on these findings, I will introduce comparative and experimental work on how chimpanzees and humans balance individual and social information under different risks in exploration and decision making. Finally, I will present recent work developing agent-based models to simulate the spread of behavior in different cultural groups in humans and outline my plans to apply this approach to the evolution of learning strategies in soaring birds as part of the advertised project [in Elham Nourani's group]. This integrative perspective aims to reveal how animals adapt learning strategies to dynamic social and ecological environments across taxa.