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A key benefit of grouping in prey species is access to social information, including information about the presence of predators. Larger groups of prey animals respond both sooner and at greater distances from predators, increasing the likelihood that group members will successfully avoid capture. However, identifying predators in complex environments is a difficult task, and false alarms (alarm behaviours without genuine threat) appear surprisingly frequent across a range of taxa including insects, amphibians, fish, mammals, and birds. In some bird flocks, false alarms have been recorded to substantially outnumber true alarms. False alarms can be costly in terms of both the energetic costs of producing alarm behaviours as well as lost opportunity costs (e.g. abandoning a feeding patch which was in fact safe, losing sleep if an animal is resting/roosting, or losing mating opportunities). Models have shown that false alarms may be a substantial but underappreciated cost of group living, introducing an inherent risk to using social information and a vulnerability to the propagation of false information. This review will focus on false alarms, introducing a two-stage framework to categorise the different factors hypothesised to influence the propensity of animal groups to produce false alarms. A number of factors may affect false alarm rate, and this new framework splits these factors into two core processing stages: (i) individual perception and response; and (ii) group processing of predator information. In the first stage, individuals in the group monitor the environment for predator cues and respond. The factors highlighted in this stage influence the likelihood that an individual will misclassify stimuli and produce a false alarm (e.g. lower light levels can make predator identification more difficult and false alarms more common). In the second stage, alarm information from individuals is processed by the group. The factors highlighted in this stage influence the likelihood of alarm information being copied by group members and propagated through the group (e.g. some animals implement group processing mechanisms that regulate the spread of behavioural responses such as consensus decision making through the quorum response). This review follows the structure of this new framework, focussing on the causes of false alarms, factors that influence false alarm rate, the transmission of alarm information through animal groups, mechanisms to mitigate the spread of false alarms, and the consequences of false alarms. Publisher PDF

Social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom and is involved in behaviours from navigation and predator avoidance to mate choice and foraging. While social learning has been extensively studied in group-living species, this article presents a literature review demonstrating that social learning is also seen in a range of non-grouping animals, including arthropods, fishes and tetrapod groups, and in a variety of behavioural contexts. We should not be surprised by this pattern, since non-grouping animals are not necessarily non-social, and stand to benefit from attending to and responding to social information in the same ways that group-living species do. The article goes on to ask what non-grouping species can tell us about the evolution and development of social learning. First, while social learning may be based on the same cognitive processes as other kinds of learning, albeit with social stimuli, sensory organs and brain regions associated with detection and motivation to respond to social information may be under selection. Non-grouping species may provide useful comparison taxa in phylogenetic analyses investigating if and how the social environment drives selection on these input channels. Second, non-grouping species may be ideal candidates for exploring how ontogenetic experience of social cues shapes the development of social learning, allowing researchers to avoid some of the negative welfare implications associated with raising group-living animals under restricted social conditions. Finally, while non-grouping species may be capable of learning socially under experimental conditions, there is a need to consider how non-grouping restricts access to learning opportunities under natural conditions and whether this places a functional constraint on what non-grouping animals actually learn socially in the wild. Publisher PDF

Recent work has shown that animals frequently use social information from individuals of their own species as well as from other species; however, the ecological and evolutionary consequences of this social information use remain poorly understood. Additionally, information users may be selective in their social information use, deciding from whom and how to use information, but this has been overlooked in an interspecific context. In particular, the intentional decision to reject a behaviour observed via social information has received less attention, although recent work has indicated its presence in various taxa. Based on existing literature, we explore in which circumstances selective interspecific information use may lead to different ecological and coevolutionary outcomes between two species, such as explaining observed co-occurrences of putative competitors. The initial ecological differences and the balance between the costs of competition and the benefits of social information use potentially determine whether selection may lead to trait divergence, convergence or coevolutionary arms race between two species. We propose that selective social information use, including adoption and rejection of behaviours, may have far-reaching fitness consequences, potentially leading to community-level eco-evolutionary outcomes. We argue that these consequences of selective interspecific information use may be much more widespread than has thus far been considered. peerReviewed

Infants show remarkable skills for processing music in the first year of life. Such skills are believed to foster social and communicative development, yet little is known about how infants? own preferences for music develop and whether social information plays a role. Here, we investigate whether the reactions of another person influence infants? responses to music. Specifically, 12-month-olds (N = 33) saw an actor react positively or negatively after listening to clips of instrumental music. Arousal (measured via pupil dilation) and attention (measured via looking time) were assessed when infants later heard the clips without the actor visible. Results showed greater pupil dilation when listening to music clips that had previously been reacted to negatively than those that had been reacted to positively (Exp. 1). This effect was not replicated when a similar, rather than identical, clip from the piece of music was used in the test phase (Exp. 2, N = 35 12-month-olds). There were no effects of the actor's positive or negative reaction on looking time. Together, our findings suggest that infants are sensitive to others? positive and negative reactions not only for concrete objects, such as food or toys, but also for more abstract stimuli including music.

In insect societies, the balance between exploitation of known resources and exploration of new ones is important to ensure sufficient resources. Mass recruiting ants, such as Lasius niger, use pheromone trails to recruit nestmates to a newly discovered food source. Pheromone following, however, shows characteristic non‐following (lapse) rates among different species, with ∼20% of L. niger foragers ignoring pheromone. These characteristic lapse rates might simply be ‘noise’, or they might indicate a subset of specialised explorative foragers, a scouting caste, that consistently ignores pheromone in order to explore. Here we show pheromone ignoring is not a repeatable behaviour in L. niger foragers – ants who did not follow a trail were no more likely to ignore it again an hour later than ants which did follow it. Our findings suggest that there is no subset of specialised pheromone‐ignoring L. niger foragers. This may be due to their moderate colony size and strong reliance on individual memories: species with larger colony sizes or a weaker reliance on private information (i.e. memory) may have specialist non‐followers. Our work raises the question: what is a scout ant? We encourage future research to investigate the presence of a scouting caste in other ant species using our straightforward methodology, as a social information‐ignoring caste may be rarer than expected.

Contains fulltext : 237682.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Adolescence is often characterized by heightened risk-taking behaviors, which are shaped by social influence from parents and peers. However, little is understood about how adolescents make risky decisions under conflicting influence. The valuation system in the brain may elucidate how adolescents differentially integrate conflicting social information. Twenty-eight adolescents (M(age) = 12.7 years) completed a social influence task during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Behaviorally, adolescents took more risks only when their parent endorsed risky decisions but not when their peers endorsed risky decisions. At the neural level, adolescents showed enhanced vmPFC-striatum functional connectivity when they made risky decisions that followed their parents' risky decisions. Results suggest that parents' decisions may guide youths' risk-taking behavior under conflicting influence.

Prior work indicates that infants can use social information to organize simple audiovisual inputs into predictable rules by 8 months of age. However, it is unclear whether infants can use social information to organize more complex events into predictable rules that can be used to guide motor action. To examine these issues, we tested 9-month-old infants using a modified version of an A-not-B task, in which hiding event sequences were paired with different experimenters, who could be used to organize the events into rules that guide action. We predicted that infants’ reaching accuracy would be better when the experimenter changes when the toy’s hiding location changes, relative to when the experimenter stays the same, as this should cue a novel rule used to guide action. Experiments 1 and 2 validated this prediction. Experiment 3 showed that reaching accuracy was better when the toy’s hiding location switched but was consistent with the rule associated with the experimenter, relative to when the toy’s hiding location repeated but was inconsistent with the rule associated with the experimenter. These data suggest that infants can use the identities of experimenters to organize events into predictable rules that guide action in the A-not-B task.

We replicated Shillingsburg et al. (2018) by teaching children with autism to mand for social information while analyzing the variables influencing the emission of mands. We presented questions about a social partner that were known and observable (e.g., "What is Robin doing?"), known but unobservable (i.e., questions for which an intraverbal response had previously been taught, such as, "Where does Robin work?"), or unknown (e.g., "What is Robin's favorite food?"). Correct answers were reinforced across all conditions. During treatment, we prompted children to mand for information from the social partner following only unknown questions. All children acquired mands for social information and answered previously unknown questions correctly after manding for social information and 3 of 4 participants emitted mands to novel social partners, including a peer with autism.

Increasingly, jurisdictions around the world have been enacting standards that formally allow organizations to offer equity using the crowdfunding model. Using the Internet, the crowdfunding model raises capital by soliciting from a large number of people (i.e., the crowd). A key feature of crowdfunding that has been embraced by regulators is the use of social information to inform investors as a safeguard for this type of investing. However, research has not yet explored how investors utilize this information. In this study, I investigate whether social information can shift investors away from financial maximization goals. Social identity theory predicts that people can be provoked to act as representatives of their group, setting aside individual interests. I predict, and find, that positive social information focused on an equity crowdfunding organization can activate the social identity of investors who share an identity with that organization, causing them to invest more in a relatively weak organization. In a moderated mediation analysis, I find that positive social information provokes investors who share an identity with an organization to feel a stronger connection to that organization, leading them to increase investment. In addition, I explore whether investors' perceptions of negative social information are moderated by their social identity. I find that investors who are deeply committed to an identity shared with an organization experiencing negative social information will defensively invest in that organization. The findings of this study will be of interest to investors, regulators, and crowdfunding organizations.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired predictive abilities; however, the neural mechanisms subsuming reward prediction errors in ASD are poorly understood. In the current study, we investigated neural responses during social and nonsocial reward prediction errors in 22 adolescents with ASD (ages 12-17) and 20 typically developing control adolescents (ages 12-18). Participants performed a reward prediction error task using both social (i.e., faces) and nonsocial (i.e., objects) rewards during a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan. Reward prediction errors were defined in two ways: (a) the signed prediction error, the difference between the experienced and expected reward; and (b) the thresholded unsigned prediction error, the difference between expected and unexpected outcomes regardless of magnitude. During social reward prediction errors, the ASD group demonstrated the following differences relative to the TD group: (a) signed prediction error: decreased activation in the right precentral gyrus and increased activation in the right frontal pole; and (b) thresholded unsigned prediction error: increased activation in the right anterior cingulate gyrus and bilateral precentral gyrus. Groups did not differ in brain activation during nonsocial reward prediction errors. Within the ASD group, exploratory analyses revealed that reaction times and social-communication impairments were related to precentral gyrus activation during social prediction errors. These findings elucidate the neural mechanisms of social reward prediction errors in ASD and suggest that ASD is characterized by greater neural atypicalities during social, relative to nonsocial, reward prediction errors in ASD. Autism Res 2020, 13: 715-728. © 2020 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: We used brain imaging to evaluate differences in brain activation in adolescents with autism while they performed tasks that involved learning about social and nonsocial information. We found no differences in brain responses during the nonsocial condition, but differences during the social condition of the learning task. This study provides evidence that autism may involve different patterns of brain activation when learning about social information.

OBJECTIVE People gather important social information from subtle nonverbal cues. Given that one's attachment style can meaningfully affect the quality of one's relationships, we investigated whether people could perceive men's and women's attachment styles from photos of their neutral faces. METHOD In two studies, we measured targets' attachment styles then asked participants (total N = 893) to judge the male and female targets' attachment anxiety and avoidance from photos of their neutral faces (total N = 331) and to report their own attachment anxiety and avoidance. RESULTS Participants detected men's attachment style from face photos significantly better than chance in an initial exploratory study and in a preregistered replication but did not consistently detect women's attachment style from their face photos. Moreover, participants' own attachment style biased these first impressions: Individuals with greater attachment anxiety viewed others as more anxiously attached. CONCLUSIONS People can detect some hints of unacquainted others' attachment styles from their faces but their own anxious attachment can bias these judgments.

The increasing development of resistant pathogens is one of the greatest global health challenges. As antibiotic overuse amplifies antibiotic resistance, antibiotic intake poses a social dilemma in which individuals need to decide whether to prosocially reduce their intake in the collective interest versus to (over)use it even in case of mild diseases. We devise a novel behavioral game paradigm to model the social dilemma of antibiotic intake. Using this new method in an incentivized laboratory experiment (N = 272 German participants), we varied whether players had mutual knowledge about their antibiotic intake. The results indicate that there was substantial antibiotic overuse in the absence of social information. Overuse decreased when social information was present. Our postexperimental survey data further suggest that social information impacts people's behavioral motivation, evaluation of the other player, and positive affect. Taken together, providing social information about people's antibiotic intake may help in reducing antibiotic overuse. On a more general level, the novel behavioral game may be adapted to study other aspects of antibiotic intake to promote prudent use of antibiotics.

Crows and other birds in the family Corvidae regularly share information to learn the identity and whereabouts of dangerous predators, but can they use social learning to solve a novel task for a food reward? Here, we examined the factors affecting the ability of 27 wild‐caught American crows to solve a common string pulling task in a laboratory setting. We split crows into two groups; one group was given the task after repeatedly observing a conspecific model the solution and the other solved in the absence of conspecific models. We recorded the crows’ estimated age, sex, size, body condition, level of nervousness, and brain volume using DICOM images from a CT scan. Although none of these variables were statistically significant, crows without a conspecific model and large brain volumes consistently mastered the task in the minimum number of days, whereas those with conspecific models and smaller brain volumes required varying and sometimes a substantial number of days to master the task. We found indirect evidence that body condition might also be important for motivating crows to solve the task. Crows with conspecific models were no more likely to initially solve the task than those working the puzzle without social information, but those that mastered the task usually copied the method most frequently demonstrated by their knowledgeable neighbors. These findings suggest that brain volume and possibly body condition may be factors in learning new tasks and that crows can use social learning to refine their ability to obtain a novel food source, although they must initially learn to access it themselves.

A challenge in the Bachelor's studies in Biology is to strike a balance between reducing the teaching of practical scientific experiments to what is feasible in a short time, and teaching “real” science in undergraduate laboratories for high numbers of participants. We describe a laboratory in behavioral biology, with the primary focus on the student learning. However, also the underlying scientific question and the results of the experiment, namely the behavior of the three‐spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a trade‐off situation during foraging, is without a doubt timely and sufficient for scientific studies on this subject, and this through the experiments conducted and data collected by the students. The students rated this laboratory well and learned at the end that social information is certainly important, but that self‐learning can be more important, and this not only in small fish, but also for the students themselves., We describe a laboratory in behavioral biology, with the primary focus on the student learning. However, also the underlying scientific question and the results of the experiment, namely the behavior of the three‐spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) in a trade‐off situation during foraging, are without a doubt timely and sufficient for scientific studies on this subject, and this through the experiments conducted and data collected by the students. The students rated this laboratory well.

It is well known that fish can learn to avoid angling gear after experiencing a catch‐and‐release event, that is, after a private hooking experience. However, the possible importance of social information cues and their influence on an individual's vulnerability to angling remains largely unexplored, that is, social experience of a conspecific capture. The effects of private and social experience of hooking on the stress response of fish and subsequent catch rates were examined. Hatchery‐reared rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss (Walbaum), were implanted with heart rate loggers and experimentally subjected to private or social experience of hooking. Private and social experience of angling induced an increased heart rate in fish compared with naive control fish. While private experience of hooking explained most of the reduced vulnerability to capture, no clear evidence was found that social experience of hooking affected angling vulnerability in fish that had never been hooked before. While both private and social experiences of angling constitute significant physiological stressors for rainbow trout, only the private experience reduces an individual's vulnerability to angling and in turn affecting population‐level catchability.

This work was supported by Portuguese National Funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), within the cE3c Unit FCT funding (grant number UID/BIA/00329/2013), IO PhD grant (SFRH/BD/90686/2012) and SAMV (SFRH/BPD/66042/2009 and PTDC/BIA‐ANM/0810/14) and MB (SFRH/BPD/82259/2011) Post‐Doctoral research grants. This work was also supported by the ERC (European Research Council) AdG BioTIME (250189) to AEM. Sexual selection theory suggests that males need to constantly reappraise their mating decisions to take account of the presence and the phenotypes of their rivals. Here we examine this expectation by asking: (i) If the presence of a rival influences male mating behaviour; (ii) How important is the attractiveness of the rival (absolute attractiveness) in shaping male behaviour; and (iii) How does a male's attractiveness in comparison to his rival (relative attractiveness) influence a male's mating decisions. Using the Trinidadian guppy, a species in which female mate choice (based on males’ attractive traits) plays an important role in male mating outcomes, we recorded the frequency of courtship displays and unsolicited attempts by focal males. First, we quantified focal male mating behaviour with and without a rival. Since the probability of a successful mating is, on average, halved by the presence of a rival, we predicted that under competition the focal male would invest more in less costly mating tactic—unsolicited attempts. Second, we examined how the rival's standard length and area of orange coloration mediated focal male mating behaviour. We found that rival presence influenced how focal males responded to females in terms of both mating tactics. However, the rival attractiveness elicited changes only in male courtship display. Focal males increased courtship display rate if his rival was small or if possessed large amounts of orange, regardless of considering rival absolute or relative attractiveness. Our results show that males invest in the costlier mating tactic when there is no rival or in the presence of a smaller rival. Interestingly, they make a similar investment in the presence of an attractive orange rival. Overall, this study highlights the importance of fine‐grained male decisions in mating encounters and shows that mating tactics are differentially shaped by multiple competition risk cues. Postprint

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 648841 RATCHETCOG ERC‐2014‐CoG. Many human cultural traits become increasingly beneficial as they are repeatedly transmitted, thanks to an accumulation of modifications made by successive generations. But how do later generations typically avoid modifications which revert traits to less beneficial forms already sampled and rejected by earlier generations? And how can later generations do so without direct exposure to their predecessors' behavior? One possibility is that learners are sensitive to cues of non‐random production in others' behavior, and that particular variants (e.g., those containing structural regularities unlikely to occur spontaneously) have been produced deliberately and with some effort. If this non‐random behavior is attributed to an informed strategy, then the learner may infer that apparent avoidance of certain possibilities indicates that these have already been sampled and rejected. This could potentially prevent performance plateaus resulting from learners modifying inherited behaviors randomly. We test this hypothesis in four experiments in which participants, either individually or in interacting dyads, attempt to locate rewards in a search grid, guided by partial information about another individual's experience of the task. We find that in some contexts, valid inferences about another's behavior can be made from partial information, and these inferences can be used in a way which facilitates trait adaptation. However, the benefit of these inferences appears to be limited, and in many contexts—including some which have the potential to make inferring the experience of another individual easier—there appears to be no benefit at all. We suggest that inferring previous behavior from partial social information plays a minimal role in the adaptation of cultural traits. Publisher PDF

Infants look at others' faces to gather social information. Newborns look equally at human and monkey faces but prefer human faces by 1 month, helping them learn to communicate and interact with others. Infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) look at human faces less than neurotypical infants, which may underlie some deficits in social-communication later in life. Here, we asked whether infants later diagnosed with ASD differ in their preferences for both human and nonhuman primate faces compared to neurotypical infants over their first 2 years of life. We compare infants' relative looking times to human or monkey faces paired with nonface controls (Experiment 1) and infants' total looking times to pairs of human and monkey faces (Experiment 2). Across two experiments, we find that between 6 and 18 months, infants later diagnosed with ASD show a greater downturn (decrease after an initial increase) in looking at both primate faces than neurotypical infants. A decrease in attention to primate faces may partly underlie the social-communicative difficulties in children with ASD and could reveal how early perceptual experiences with faces affect development. Autism Res 2019, 12: 249-262 © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Looking at faces helps infants learn to interact with others. Infants look equally at human and monkey faces at birth but prefer human faces by 1 month. Infants later diagnosed with ASD who show deficits in social-communication look at human faces less than neurotypical infants. We find that a downturn (decline after an initial increase) in attention to both human and monkey faces between 6 and 18 months may partly underlie the social-communicative difficulties in children with ASD.

Social interactions are at the core of social life. However, humans selectively choose their exchange partners and do not engage in all available opportunities for social encounters. In this review, we argue that attentional systems play an important role in guiding the selection of social interactions. Supported by both classic and emerging literature, we identify and characterize the three core processes-perception, interpretation, and evaluation-that interact with attentional systems to modulate selective responses to social environments. Perceptual processes facilitate attentional prioritization of social cues. Interpretative processes link attention with understanding of cues' social meanings and agents' mental states. Evaluative processes determine the perceived value of the source of social information. The interplay between attention and these three routes of processing places attention in a powerful role to manage the selection of the vast amount of social information that individuals encounter on a daily basis and, in turn, gate the selection of social interactions.

In Focus: LewanzikD., , SundaramurthyA. K., , GoerlitzH. R., (2019). Insectivorous bats integrate social information about species identity, conspecific activity and prey abundance to estimate cost–benefit ratio of interactions. Journal of Animal Ecology, 88, 1462–1473.30945281 Social interactions can generate social structures that shape the fate of individuals and populations. A key feature of social environments is the information produced by others. Whether actively shared or obtained via ‘eavesdropping’, individuals of many species use publically available information to guide their decision making in important ways. Lewanzik et al. (2019) explore social information use within and across several echolocating bat species. They experimentally manipulated the content of social information about prey abundance with playback experiments of echolocation calls. All species were found to use heterospecific and conspecific social information about conspecific activity levels and prey abundance. This is a rare experimental confirmation of social information use at a community level., This In Focus article summarizes the approach and the results of an interesting broad‐scale experiment on eavesdropping in bats. The authors discuss the results from a broader perspective of the importance of interspecific community‐level social structure.

Funding: University of St Andrews Internal state, in this case hunger, is known to influence both the organisation of animal groups and the social foraging interactions that occur within them. In this study we investigated the effects of hunger upon the time taken to locate and converge upon hidden simulated prey patches in a socially foraging fish, the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus). We predicted that groups of food-deprived fish would find and recruit to prey patches faster than recently fed groups, reasoning that they might search more rapidly and be more attentive to inadvertent social information produced by other foragers. Instead we saw no difference between the two groups in the time taken to find the patches and found that in fact, once prey patches had been discovered, it was the recently fed fish that converged on them most rapidly. This finding is likely due to the fact that recently fed fish tend to organise themselves into fewer but larger subgroups, which arrived at the food patch together. Hunger has a significant impact upon the social organisation of the fish shoals, and it appears that this has a stronger effect upon the rate at which they converged upon the food patches than does internal state itself. Postprint

Social information “nudges” concerning how others perform typically boost individual performances in experiments with one group reference point. However, in many natural settings, sometimes due to policy, there are several such group reference points. We address the complications that such multiple group social information might introduce through an experiment. The boost to average performance is significant and comparable to the one group case. Between-group inequality does not change. Individual inequality falls, however, because the boost is largest among the pre-“nudge” very poor performers. Finally, the boost to average performance is highest when individuals freely choose their group affiliations.

Through its behavior, an organism intentionally or unintentionally produces information. Use of this "social information" by surrounding conspecifics or heterospecifics is a ubiquitous phenomenon that can drive strong correlations in fitness-associated behaviors, such as predator avoidance, enhancing survival within and among competing species. By eliciting indirect positive interactions between competing individuals or species, social information might alter overall competitive outcomes. To test this potential, we present new theory that quantifies the effect of social information, modeled as predator avoidance signals/cues, on the outcomes from intraspecific and interspecific competition. Our analytical and numerical results reveal that social information can rescue populations from extinction and can shift the long-term outcome of competitive interactions from mutual exclusion to coexistence, or vice versa, depending on the relative strengths of intraspecific and interspecific social information and competition. Our findings highlight the importance of social information in determining ecological outcomes.

The way an individual attends to social information has implications for his/her ability to regulate behavior in social settings. The results of the present investigation suggest that early experiences in parent–child relationships contribute to later differences in the deployment of attention to social information. The quality of the mother–child relationship was assessed at one-year-of-age. At seven to eight years of age, a dot-probe paradigm assessed immediate and delayed attention to pictures of faces vs. pictures of neutral objects. Children who were more avoidant with their mother in infancy attended to neutral objects over social stimuli at delayed but not immediate time frames. This finding suggests that individual differences in attention to social stimuli in childhood are associated with the quality of the prior attachment relationship with a primary caregiver.

It is well understood that information cues associated with an investment opportunity generally impact one's willingness to participate in that opportunity. What is less well understood, however, is how different types of information cues affect individuals differently, and whether this effect is contingent on the decision maker's individual attributes. Through a three-study experimental design involving a simulated crowdfunding portal, this research examined the effects of venture quality information and social information on participants’ willingness to invest in a new venture. We hypothesised that participants’ responsiveness to these information cues was contingent on their regulatory focus. Our results were generally supported, although some counterintuitive findings emerged regarding prevention-focused individuals. From a practical standpoint, our results suggest potential concerns regarding the general enthusiasm for crowdfunding, as well as some mitigating factors.

The present study concerned how the acquisition of social information, specifically knowledge about personal characteristics, influences young children's memory and suggestibility. Effects of two sources of knowledge about a target person were systematically examined: familiarity and stereotypes. Children, aged 4-5 and 7-9 years (N = 145), were randomly assigned, per age group, to experimental conditions based on a familiarity (6 hours vs. no prior exposure) × stereotype (negative depiction as messy and clumsy vs. no stereotype) factorial design. Children then watched the target person engage in a target event (a series of contests) at a preschool ("Camp Ingrid"). The children's memory and suggestibility about the target person and target event were tested after a delay of 2 weeks. Results indicated that the negative stereotype resulted in an increase in children's correct responses both to free-recall stereotype-related questions (when children were unfamiliar with the target person) and to closed-ended questions overall (for younger children). However, the stereotype was associated with greater error to stereotype-related closed-ended questions. Moreover, familiarity increased children's accuracy to closed-ended questions. Implications for theory and application are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Despite the fact that many animals live in groups, there is still no clear consensus about the ecological or evolutionary mechanisms underlying colonial living. Recently, research has suggested that colonies may be important as sources of social information. The ready availability of information from conspecifics allows animals to make better decisions about avoiding predators, reducing brood parasitism, migratory phenology, mate choice, habitat choice and foraging. These choices can play a large part in the development and maintenance of colonies. Here we review the types of information provided by colonial animals and examine the different ways in which decision-making in colonies can be enhanced by social information. We discuss what roles information might take in the evolution, formation and maintenance of colonies. In the process, we illustrate that information use permeates all aspects of colonial living.

Using three experiments, the present study investigates the impact of social exclusion on attention. Specifically, we investigate whether social exclusion promotes attentional bias to social acceptance cues (smiling faces) or social exclusion cues (angry faces) among an Asian population. The Cyberball game was adopted to manipulate social inclusion or exclusion, and a dot-probe task was used to measure individuals' responses to smiling or angry faces. In Experiments 1 and 2, each trial consisted of either a smiling or angry face that was paired with a neutral face. In Experiment 1, when the stimulus onset-asynchronies (SOA) were 500 ms, the inhibition of return emerged, indirectly indicating that social exclusion promotes sensitivity to social acceptance cues. In Experiment 2, after setting the SOA to 200 ms, we found that social exclusion promotes attentional bias to smiling faces compared to neutral faces. In Experiment 3, both smiling and angry faces were shown during each trial, and we found that social exclusion promotes attentional bias to smiling faces compared to angry faces. Therefore, the present study extends our understanding of the relationship between social exclusion and attention. Overall, it appears that after social exclusion, the desire for social reconnection trumps the desire to avoid social exclusion.

In this article, we proffer a theoretical integration of current emotions research and impression management (IM) tactics as applied to the workplace. Both IM and emotions frequently occur in organizational settings, but research has yet to consider how their simultaneous implementation may impact the ability of an individual to influence the perceptions others form of them. By integrating the emotions as social information model and a cybernetic model of IM, we attempt to explain the linkage between actor implementation of IM behaviour, paired affective displays, and downstream processing and resultant behaviour by a target. Situational and personal moderators that may impact this process are also discussed. Successful application of emotions in IM can have wide-ranging implications for outcomes of interest in human resource management, and these are discussed within several IM frameworks. Practitioner points We integrate theory and research on emotions and IM to help develop an understanding of their impact on others in the workplace. A model is provided to show how this integration may influence human resource management. Examples of this integration are shown via extant IM frameworks.

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Structural cues, such as the relative size and arrangement of parts, are key aspects of adults' representation of human bodies, and they are used to derive significant social information such as age, sex, and attractiveness. Prior studies have not clearly addressed young infants' sensitivity to these body characteristics. In the current experiments, 3.5-month-olds exhibited a preference between images of intact bodies versus those with parts in wrong locations. Infants also discriminated between intact bodies and those with distorted part proportions. In both cases, infants discriminated when images were presented upright but not when they were inverted. These results indicate that infants are sensitive to the arrangement and size of human body parts at least by 3.5 months of age. Thus, contrary to some prior reports, body representation early in life is developed enough to include structural information.

Being paired with an attractive partner increases perceptual judgements of attractiveness in humans. We tested experimentally for prestige bias, whereby individuals follow the choices of prestigious others. Women rated the attractiveness of photographs of target males which were paired with either popular or less popular model female partners. We found that pairing a photo of a man with a woman presented as his partner positively influenced the attractiveness of the man when the woman was presented as more popular (Experiment 1). Further, this effect was stronger in younger participants compared to older participants (Experiment 1). Reversing the target and model such that women were asked to rate women paired with popular and less popular men revealed no effect of model popularity and this effect was unrelated to participant age (Experiment 2). An additional experiment confirmed that participant age and not stimulus age primarily influenced the tendency to follow others' preferences in Experiment 1 (Experiment 3). We also confirmed that our manipulations of popularity lead to variation in rated prestige (Experiment 4). These results suggest a sophisticated model-based bias in social learning whereby individuals are most influenced by the choices of those who have high popularity/prestige. Furthermore, older individuals moderate their use of such social information and so this form of social learning appears strongest in younger women.

The movements of individuals – at almost any scale – are likely to depend on the behaviour of conspecifics. As an example, the movements of dispersing juveniles and their settling decisions may depend on the availability of mates and free territories, that is, both the presence and absence of other individuals. As another example, individuals can use the presence of conspecifics during foraging movements as an indicator of habitat quality. We develop a general statistical framework for identifying and characterizing conspecific influence on movements from tracking data acquired simultaneously from a set of potentially interacting individuals. We model conspecific attraction/repulsion through a functional response in which social behaviour is assumed to depend on proximity to other individuals. The model partitions variation in the functional response into a population component (common to all individuals), variation among individuals (modelled as random intercept-slope) and variation within an individual's trajectory (modelled through temporal autocorrelation). We present a Bayesian approach for the estimation of the model and illustrate its use with simulated movement data generated from a number of contrasting scenarios. We then apply the method to a case study on eagle owl Bubo bubo juvenile dispersal, demonstrating that individual movements are generally influenced by the presence of conspecifics, with the level of attraction decreasing with increasing proximity to other individuals. We further show that female eagle owls are more attracted to conspecifics than males, and both males and females are more attracted to females than to males.

The value of information within and across communities varies; however, even slight variations in this value may define boundaries between different worlds. The Theory of Information Worlds offers a framework for understanding social information behaviors in these settings. This poster reports on the operationalization of the concept of Information Value and its implications for an ongoing project focusing on the development of codebooks intended to be effective across diverse research contexts and methodologies. Specifically, the concept of Information Value is operationalized and discussed through the lenses of three different dissertation projects focusing on South Korean political discourse on Twitter, Ernestine Rose and the Harlem Library, and the digital literacy practices of role-players in a new Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Implications of Information Value on research on communities and cultures are also briefly discussed before describing the project's next steps.