Search

Organisms determine environmental quality using their senses and personal experience (personal information) but can also use byproducts of other individuals' activities (i.e. public information). The ability to use public information originating from both con- and heterospecifics gives an advantage over individuals relying only on personal information or conspecific cues. The role of public information in invasion ecology is of high concern, as any differences in this aspect between alien and native species may determine the success of the former. Here, we studied 2 pairs of sympatric invasive and native demersal fish species (racer goby Babka gymnotrachelus /European bullhead Cottus gobio ; monkey goby Neogobius fluviatilis/ gudgeon Gobio gobio) facing 2 types of public cues (associated with antipredatory and foraging behavior). We used them as a model to check if the invaders could use public information from more sources than the natives. Both invaders and the native gudgeon used cues from con- and heterospecifics, exhibiting antipredatory behavior, while the native bullhead failed to recognize such cues from heterospecifics. The monkey goby and both native species were attracted to foraging cues from donors less likely to exert competitive pressure on the observer (i.e. native species rather than potentially more aggressive invaders). On the other hand, the racer goby appeared unable to correctly recognize heterospecific foraging cues. Our results showed that public cues can enable invaders to read threat from a wide range of individuals and to find optimal food patches, which may contribute to their invasion success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social dilemmas often impose negative externalities on third parties. We experimentally analyze gender differences in cooperation in such a setting, i.e., a prisoner's dilemma game, with a passive third party that may be harmed when active players mutually cooperate. Applying a within-subjects setting, we compare cooperation under anonymity and social information, as personal characteristics are commonly known in real-life relations. Results show that the presence of a negative externality particularly affects guilt-averse women, who cooperate less often independently of the degree of information they receive. No gender difference is found absent negative externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals' movements are conditioned by the acquisition of information from personal interactions with the environment or from social sources. Despite the importance of social information in movement decision making, little is known about how individuals proceed when social information comes from multiple sources. Here, we specifically tackled this issue by experimentally testing (1) how social information from multiple sources is used to make relocation decisions and (2) whether a contrast in this information enables individuals to orient themselves in space. Using the common lizard as a model species, we conducted repeated experiments in which a focal neonate received information from two other neonates coming from distinct peripheral environments before being given the opportunity to relocate to either peripheral environment. Specifically, we focused on information on resource availability and intraspecific competition by considering informants' body mass (BM) at birth and their subsequent food intake. Our analyses revealed that the amount of resources in the informants' environments affected relocation decisions, depending on the focal individual's phenotype. We found the probability of relocation increased when both the informants' food intake and the focal individual's BM increased or decreased. We also found the relocation increased when both the informants' and focal individual's BM increased or decreased. Our findings suggest that focal individuals adjust their relocation response to social information according to their needs and/or physical abilities. Conversely, we found no significant effect of differences in BM between informants or spatial variability in resource availability on spatial orientation. This study highlights that multiple sources of social information that reflect the quality of the surrounding environment (competition or resource availability) can be used for movement decision making. • Common lizard neonates can use multiple social information for relocation decisions. • Social information is processed based on the information receiver's condition. • Relocation increased when both informants' food intake and receiver's body mass did. • Relocation increased when both informants' body mass and receiver's body mass did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Social information is predicted to enhance the quality of animals’ migratory decisions in dynamic ecosystems, but the relative benefits of social information in the long-range movements of marine megafauna are unknown. In particular, whether and how migrants use nonlocal information gained through social communication at the large spatial scale of oceanic ecosystems remains unclear. Here we test hypotheses about the cues underlying timing of blue whales’ breeding migration in the Northeast Pacific via individual-based models parameterized by empirical behavioral data. Comparing emergent patterns from individual-based models to individual and population-level empirical metrics of migration timing, we find that individual whales likely rely on both personal and social sources of information about forage availability in deciding when to depart from their vast and dynamic foraging habitat and initiate breeding migration. Empirical patterns of migratory phenology can only be reproduced by models in which individuals use long-distance social information about conspecifics’ behavioral state, which is known to be encoded in the patterning of their widely propagating songs. Further, social communication improves pre-migration seasonal foraging performance by over 60% relative to asocial movement mechanisms. Our results suggest that long-range communication enhances the perceptual ranges of migrating whales beyond that of any individual, resulting in increased foraging performance and more collective migration timing. These findings indicate the value of nonlocal social information in an oceanic migrant and suggest the importance of long-distance acoustic communication in the collective migration of wide-ranging marine megafauna.

Observers can rapidly extract the mean emotion from a set of faces with remarkable precision, known as ensemble coding. Previous studies have demonstrated that matched physical backgrounds improve the precision of ongoing ensemble tasks. However, it remains unknown whether this facilitation effect still occurs when matched social information is perceived from the backgrounds. In two experiments, participants decided whether the test face in the retrieving phase appeared more disgusted or neutral than the mean emotion of the face set in the encoding phase. Both phases were paired with task-irrelevant animated backgrounds, which included either the forward movement trajectory carrying the "cooperatively chasing" information, or the backward movement trajectory conveying no such chasing information. The backgrounds in the encoding and retrieving phases were either mismatched (i.e., forward and backward replays of the same trajectory), or matched (i.e., two identical forward movement trajectories in Experiment 1, or two different forward movement trajectories in Experiment 2). Participants in both experiments showed higher ensemble precisions and better discrimination sensitivities when backgrounds matched. The findings suggest that consistent social information perceived from memory-related context exerts a context-matching facilitation effect on ensemble coding and, more importantly, this effect is independent of consistent physical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social information is predicted to enhance the quality of animals' migratory decisions in dynamic ecosystems, but the relative benefits of social information in the long-range movements of marine megafauna are unknown. In particular, whether and how migrants use nonlocal information gained through social communication at the large spatial scale of oceanic ecosystems remains unclear. Here we test hypotheses about the cues underlying timing of blue whales' breeding migration in the Northeast Pacific via individual-based models parameterized by empirical behavioral data. Comparing emergent patterns from individual-based models to individual and population-level empirical metrics of migration timing, we find that individual whales likely rely on both personal and social sources of information about forage availability in deciding when to depart from their vast and dynamic foraging habitat and initiate breeding migration. Empirical patterns of migratory phenology can only be reproduced by models in which individuals use long-distance social information about conspecifics' behavioral state, which is known to be encoded in the patterning of their widely propagating songs. Further, social communication improves pre-migration seasonal foraging performance by over 60% relative to asocial movement mechanisms. Our results suggest that long-range communication enhances the perceptual ranges of migrating whales beyond that of any individual, resulting in increased foraging performance and more collective migration timing. These findings indicate the value of nonlocal social information in an oceanic migrant and suggest the importance of long-distance acoustic communication in the collective migration of wide-ranging marine megafauna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: During early adolescence, peer influences play a crucial role in shaping learning and decision preferences. When teens observe what their peers are doing, they can learn and change their behavior, especially when they are taking risks. Our study incorporated an economical behavioral task and computational modeling framework to examine whether and how early male adolescents’ risk attitudes change when they see information about their peers’ choices. Methods: We recruited 38 middle school male students aged 12-15 years. The experiment consisted of three sessions: The first and third sessions were designed to evaluate the risk attitude of the participants. In the second session, participants were asked to guess the choices made by their peers, and then, the computer gave them feedback on the correctness of their predictions. Each participant was randomly assigned to risk-taking or risk-averse peers. Results: Our results revealed that teenagers who predicted risk-averse peers exhibited significant declines in their risk attitudes during the last session. On the other hand, participants with risk-seeking peers exhibited a significantly higher level of risk attitudes after predicting their peers. The data showed that these peer-biased changes in risk attitudes are proportional to the gap between teens and their peers’ risk perspectives. Results showed that their perspectives aligned closer after receiving the information, and approximately a third of the gap was eliminated. Conclusion: Here, by combining choice data and computational modeling, we demonstrate that risky behavior is contagious among male adolescents. According to our data, peer-biased risk contagion, a socially motivated and deliberate process, is associated with social distance in teens. There's no causal directionality here, but we could speculate that peer influence goes hand-in-hand with social integration as an adaptive process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Ibero-Americana de Ciência da Informação is the property of Revista Ibero-Americana de Ciencia da Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Female advertisement of reproductive state and receptivity has the potential to play a large role in the mating systems of many taxa, but investigations of this phenomenon are underrepresented in the literature. North American red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) are highly territorial and engage in scramble competition mating, with males converging from spatially disparate territories to engage in mating chases. Given the narrow estrus window exhibited in this species, the ubiquitous use of vocalizations to advertise territory ownership, and the high synchronicity of males arriving from distant territories, we hypothesized that female vocalizations contain cues relating to their estrous state. To test this hypothesis, we examined the spectral and temporal properties of female territorial rattle vocalizations collected from females of known reproductive condition over 3 years. While we found no distinct changes associated with estrus specifically, we did identify significant changes in the spectral characteristics of rattles relating to both female body mass and reproductive state relative to parturition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence of changes in vocal characteristics associated with late pregnancy in a nonhuman mammal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary contributions are a crucial resource for nonprofit organizations and challenging to acquire. Social information on other people's contributions has been found to positively influence individual giving behavior. However, a clear understanding how social information reference groups impact volunteering intentions is missing. Drawing on social comparison theory, we conducted a survey experiment with variations in social information reference groups to shed light on mechanisms within social comparison processes in volunteering. Results show that volunteering intention increases when social information refers to reference groups similar to recipients (ingroups) compared with reference groups without similarities (outgroups). This effect is mediated by group identification. In contrast, shifts in volunteering aspiration are anchored by observed performance levels and independent of reference groups. The study contributes to the social information literature and suggests the need to distinguish different forms of social information to understand social comparison processes in volunteering, relevant for researchers and practitioners alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animals rely on a balance of personal and social information to decide when and where to move next in order to access a desired resource. The benefits from cueing on conspecifics to reduce uncertainty about resource availability can be rapidly overcome by the risks of within-group competition, often exacerbated toward low-ranked individuals. Being obligate soarers, relying on thermal updraughts to search for carcasses around which competition can be fierce, vultures represent ideal models to investigate the balance between personal and social information during foraging movements. Linking dominance hierarchy, social affinities and meteorological conditions to movement decisions of eight captive vultures, Gyps spp., released for free flights in natural soaring conditions, we found that they relied on social information (i.e. other vultures using/having used the thermals) to find the next thermal updraught, especially in unfavourable flight conditions. Low-ranked individuals were more likely to disregard social cues when deciding where to go next, possibly to minimize the competitive risk of social aggregation. These results exemplify the architecture of decision-making during flight in social birds. It suggests that the environmental context, the context of risk and the social system as a whole calibrate the balance between personal and social information use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information cascades have been used to explain a variety of collective behaviours in nonhuman animals, including mate selection, antipredator responses and social foraging. A taxonomically widespread phenomenon, information cascades occur in many group-living animals from ant colonies to schools of fish and social mammals. Here we review the animal behaviour literature for examples of information cascades. We found that the literature on information cascades in animals is limited by inconsistent terminology that fails to adequately describe the differences between cascade types. We propose a classification framework, adapted from behavioural economics, to describe information cascades in behavioural ecology. Our framework consists of three types of information cascades derived from individual level fitness outcomes (adaptive, maladaptive or neutral) and a further two cascade types based on the transmission mechanism of cascading social information (signals or cues). We use a selection of past studies to illustrate the diversity of information cascades and we apply our framework to real world examples. We also discuss four mechanisms used by group-living animals to minimize the spread of maladaptive information cascades and propose avenues for future research. • Information cascades drive collective behaviours in a diverse suite of animal taxa. • Information cascades may be adaptive, selectively neutral or maladaptive. • Cascades are classified by their selective outcome and mode of transmission. • Group-living animals employ several mechanisms to minimize maladaptive cascades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, in recent years, has attracted an extensive amount of attention from the academic community. RNN-based methods cannot establish effective long-term dependencies among the input sequences when capturing the user's motion patterns, resulting in inadequate exploitation of user preferences. Besides, the majority of prior studies often neglect high-order neighborhood information in users' check-in trajectory and their social relationships, yielding suboptimal recommendation efficacy. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Double-Layer Attention Network model, named DLAN. Firstly, DLAN incorporates a multi-head attention module that can combine first-order and high-order neighborhood information in user check-in trajectories, thereby effectively and parallelly capturing both long- and short-term preferences of users and overcoming the problem that RNN-based methods cannot establish long-term dependencies between sequences. Secondly, this paper designs a user similarity weighting layer to measure the influence of other users on the target users leverage the social relationships among them. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted on user check-in data from two cities, New York (NYC) and Tokyo (TKY), and the results demonstrate that DLAN achieves a performance in Accuracy and Mean Reverse Rank enhancement by 8.07% -36.67% compared to the state-of-the-art method. Moreover, to investigate the effect of dimensionality and the number of heads of the multi-head attention mechanism on the performance of the DLAN model, we have done sufficient sensitivity experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the harsh environment hypothesis, natural selection should favour cognitive mechanisms to overcome environmental challenges. Tests of this hypothesis to date have largely focused on asocial learning and memory, thus failing to account for the spread of information via social means. Tests in specialized food-hoarding birds have shown strong support for the effects of environmental harshness on both asocial and social learning. Whether the hypothesis applies to non-specialist foraging species remains largely unexplored. We evaluated the relative importance of social learning across a known harshness gradient by testing generalist great tits, Parus major, from high (harsh)- and low (mild)-elevation populations in two social learning tasks. We showed that individuals use social learning to find food in both colour-associative and spatial foraging tasks and that individuals differed consistently in their use of social learning. However, we did not detect a difference in the use or speed of implementing socially observed information across the elevational gradient. Our results do not support predictions of the harsh environment hypothesis suggesting that context-dependent costs and benefits as well as plasticity in the use of social information may play an important role in the use of social learning across environments. Finally, this study adds to the accumulating evidence that the harsh environment hypothesis appears to have more pronounced effects on specialists compared to generalist species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "All by myself? Testing descriptive social norm-nudges to increase flood preparedness among homeowners" examines the effectiveness of social norm-nudges in promoting flood preparedness among homeowners. The study conducted an online experiment with homeowners in two European countries and tested different norm-nudge messages. The results showed no evidence of a treatment effect, suggesting that the social norm-nudges did not influence flood preparedness. The study highlights the importance of tailoring norm-nudges to specific populations and contexts and calls for further research in the field of natural disaster risk reduction. [Extracted from the article]

This article provides a comparative review of sustainability reporting practices in Indonesia and Nordic countries. The study finds that Indonesia falls behind Nordic countries in terms of both the quantity and quality of sustainability reports. The article emphasizes the need for further development and detailed guidelines to effectively manage sustainability risks. It also highlights the importance of proper regulation to support sustainability reporting by public companies. The text discusses the adoption of sustainable practices and corporate social responsibility reporting globally, with Europe and Scandinavia leading the way. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for improved sustainability reporting practices and regulations in Indonesia. [Extracted from the article]

To date, videos are often presented on social media platforms where they are accompanied by social information in the form of user comments. Research suggests that this social information can alter viewers’ video enjoyment. The present study aimed to learn more about two factors that may enhance this effect by conducting a 2x2 between-subjects experiment with a control group (N = 290, Mage = 20.82, SDage = 2.49) in the Netherlands. First, we investigated the role that the source of social information (i.e., in-group vs. out-group) plays in the effect of social information. Second, we explored how writing a comment while watching a video (i.e., commenting vs. no commenting) may alter the effect of the source of social information. Results indicated that social information created by in-group members is more influential than social information created by out-group members. However, writing a comment did not increase viewers’ susceptibility to the effects of social information. These results are discussed in light of the social identity framework, leading to new insights into what may bolster the effect of social information on video enjoyment when individuals watch videos presented on social media.

AbstractThis study was conducted to examine the relationship among environmental, social disclosure, sustainable development, and firm performance. The data is collected from 71 mining companies listed on Vietnam’s stock market from 2018 to 2021. Research results show that the level of environmental and social disclosure has direct impact on the level of sustainable development and firm performance of the company. Moreover, the results also show that the level of environmental and social disclosure has indirect impact on the firm performance of through the sustainability variable. Through findings, some recommendations are given for promoting social and environmental disclose of Vietnamese mining companies and similar countries to raise their awareness and responsibility for social and environmental information disclosure.

Conspiracy believers often claim to be critical thinkers their 'own research' instead of relying on others' testimony. In two preregistered behavioural studies conducted in the United Kingdom and Pakistan (Nparticipants = 864, Ntrials = 5408), we test whether conspiracy believers have a general tendency to discount social information (in favour of their own opinions and intuitions). We found that conspiracy mentality is not associated with social information use in text‐based (Study 1) and image‐based (Study 2) advice‐taking tasks. Yet, we found discrepancies between self‐reported and actual social information use. Conspiracy believers were more likely to report relying less on social information than actually relying less on social information in the behavioural tasks. Our results suggest that the scepticism of conspiracy believers towards epistemic authorities is unlikely to be the manifestation of a general tendency to discount social information. Conspiracy believers may be more permeable to social influence than they sometimes claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shuaiqi Li,1 Kehan Li,2 Jianbiao Li3 1School of Finance, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Economics, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, People’s Republic of China; 3Institute for Study of Brain-Like Economics/School of Economics, Shandong University, Jinan, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Kehan Li; Jianbiao Li, Email kehanlee@126.com; biaojl@126.comPurpose: This study assesses how various social information influence individuals’ money donation behaviors towards charitable funds against the COVID-19 pandemic at different stages of the pandemic. It also explores the mediating role of social anxiety and the moderating role of self-control.Materials and Methods: This three-wave study was conducted with online survey experiments using convenience sampling at the pandemic’s outbreak stage (April–June 2020), trough stage (February–March 2021), and resurgence stage (May 2022) in China. The nudge power of social information was measured by whether participants changed their initial money donation decisions after informed positive or negative social information. Self-report scales were used to measure levels of social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale) and self-control (Self-Control Scale). The final data set included 1371 participants from 26 provinces of mainland China. Stata medeff package and SPSS PROCESS were used to analyze the data.Results: Individuals’ initial donation behaviors did not fluctuate along with the pandemic status, but the nudge effect of social information did. From outbreak stage to trough stage, the nudge power of positive social information significantly declined, but did not significantly change again at the resurgence stage. By contrast, the nudge power of negative social information did not significantly differ between outbreak and trough stage but did significantly increase at the resurgence stage. Social anxiety played a significant mediating role in the relationship between COVID-19 status and power of social information. Moreover, self-control moderated the direct effect of COVID-19 status on power of social information and the indirect effect via social anxiety.Conclusion: Our findings enrich research on the nudge power variation of social information on individuals’ donation behaviors along with the pandemic status and its potential psychological influence factors. This study also helps guide organizations to better design and carry out social information nudge mechanism.Keywords: COVID-19, nudge, social information, donation, social anxiety, self-control

Prey species that form groups gain a range of benefits from associating with conspecifics, including access to social information. Groups typically coordinate collective movement through local interactions, where individuals copy their nearest neighbours' behaviour to generate group level decisions. However, individuals in a group may not always make 'correct' decisions, and blind copying of behaviour can lead to the spread of poor information and maladaptive cascades. To impede the spread of poor information, many animals that form groups have developed information-dampening mechanisms such as consensus decision making through the quorum response. In this study we monitored flocks of roosting Eurasian oystercatchers with a view to understanding the mechanics of group departure decisions and to test for the presence of a quorum response. Nearing high tide, oystercatchers would leave the roosting site en masse, where the timing of departure of many individuals was coordinated. Coordinating the timing of mass departures was a complex task as single birds and small groups frequently joined and departed from the roosting site, meaning individuals had to decide which departures to copy and which to ignore. Individual oystercatchers were more likely to depart within 10 s of another bird if they were closer together in the group, suggesting that departure information may be transferred locally between neighbouring birds. While single departures were very common, most individuals departed in groups of 10 or more, showing that single departures were a relatively weak departure cue and were frequently ignored by the rest of the group. The probability of an individual joining a departure event was higher with increasing departure group size in a nonlinear (sigmoidal) relationship. This trend is consistent with a quorum response with the propensity to copy the departure of groupmates sharply increasing at a quorum threshold of about 10 birds. • Roosting oystercatchers departed en masse in response to the rising tide. • Departure information flows locally between close neighbouring birds. • The likelihood of joining a departure sharply rises at departing group sizes of >10. • Oystercatchers may use consensus decision making to regulate mass departures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications is the property of Beijing Journal of Computer Engineering & Applications Journal Co Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Backed artefacts are multifunctional tools used by many Australian Aboriginal groups. Most were retouched in order to shape them rather than to create or modify a working edge, which suggests that they may have been made to certain shapes or sizes according to local traditions. This possibility is feasible as backed artefacts were not used for any unique functions. Hiscock (2014) found that variation in backed artefact shape (symmetry) across Australia was underlain by social arrangements and was potentially historically situated. But McDonald et al. (2018) found that backed artefacts from the Western Desert did not conform to the continental trend. We suggest that an important factor missing from these studies is a consideration of the potential for variation at different spatial scales. To investigate this possibility, we conducted morphometric and use-wear analyses on backed artefacts from four environmentally and socially different Aboriginal groups in New South Wales. The backed artefacts were not used for any distinct tasks and none in our study was hafted, but some variations exist in the morphometrics at the intra-regional scale. We infer that backed artefact production included group-specific traditions that potentially embody social information relating to local land-using or descent groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choosing the right migration timing is critical for migrants because conditions encountered en route influence movement costs, survival, and, in social migrants, the availability of social information. Depending on lifetime stages, individuals may migrate at different times due to diverging constraints, affecting the composition of migration groups. To examine the consequences of a delayed migration timing, we artificially delayed the migration of juvenile white storks (Ciconia ciconia) and thereby altered their physical and social environment. Using nearly continuous 1 Hz GPS trajectories, we examined their migration behaviour, ranging from sub-second level performance to global long-distance movement, in relation to two control groups. We found that delayed storks experienced suboptimal soaring conditions, but better wind support and thereby achieved higher flight speeds than control storks. Delayed storks had a lower mortality rate than the control storks and wintered closer to the breeding area. In fact, none of the delayed storks reached the traditional African wintering areas. Thus, our results show that juvenile storks can survive migrating at the 'wrong' time. However, this had long-term consequences on migration decisions. We suggest that, when timing their migration, storks balance not just energy and time, but also the availability of social information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Peer effects on the decision to commit a crime have often been documented. But how little does it take to trigger the effect? Method: A fully incentivized, anonymous experiment in the tradition of experimental law and economics provides fully internally valid causal evidence. A companion vignette study with members of the general public extends external validity. Results: (a) the more of their peers violate an arbitrary rule, the more participants do; (b) a minority has a threshold and switches from rule-abiding to violation once a sufficient number of their peers violate the rule; (c) the more the rule is constraining, the more participants are sensitive to the number of others who violate the rule; (d) if participants do not have explicit information about the incidence of rule violations in their community, they rely on their beliefs. Conclusion: In terms of substance, the paper shows that mere social information is the core of peer effects. In terms of methodology, the paper demonstrates the power of incentivized, decontextualized lab experiments for isolating mental building blocks of the decision to commit a crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender Systems (RS) suffer from the typical new user and data sparsity problems. In order to reduce these issues, a RecommEndation Model based on sOcio-enVironmental contExt called REMOVE is proposed in this paper. By elaborating the state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms, we conclude that the merge of both social and environmental information should be taken into consideration in a recommendation model. Hence, in our model, we argue that modifying the vector of characteristics of items as well that of the users can significantly improve recommendation quality. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no prior work that investigated matrix factorization by modelling item vector characteristic and considering social and environmental information. For the experimentation, we compared our approach to those that integrate contextual information. This evaluation provided encouraging results in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and demonstrates that's REMOVE can better handle the concerned issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We frequently use social information when making decisions.For instance, other people may know more about a problemthan we do, so we might update our initial beliefs in light oftheir opinions. The epistemic value of these social cues de-pends in part on their informational independence. Peopleshould thus be sensitive to nonindependence in their weightingof social information. However, the current literature yieldsconflicting results. In one recent study, participants valued so-cial information less when it was nonindependent; in another,participants were insensitive to nonindependence. We identifypossible causes of this inconsistency, and present an experi-mental paradigm that aims to fill these gaps. Then, in a study(N=200) with pre-registered hypotheses and analyses, we findthat participants were not sensitive to cue dependence. Wehighlight the relevance of this finding for the modern mediacontext, where nonindependence of both traditional and socialmedia sources can lead to the spread of bias or false belief.

Behavioral plasticity can be described as the ability to adjust behavior depending on environmental information. We used a food-storing (caching) paradigm, during which individuals either ate or cached food under different conditions, to investigate whether they could adjust their caching behavior when observed by conspecifics and heterospecifics and which social cues they used to elicit these behavioral changes. We examined the location and number of caches made by two corvid species differing in sociality: highly social pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus) and less social Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana). Although pinyon jays cached a similar amount of food across conditions, they allocated significantly more caches to areas less accessible to the observer. Nutcrackers, however, significantly reduced the number of seeds cached when another nutcracker was present in comparison to when they cached alone. Both species relied on different social cues to elicit re-caching: pinyon jays responded to the amount of time the observer spent close to the caching locations, whereas nutcrackers responded to the amount of time the observer spent pilfering their caches. The differences in cache protection behaviors and the social cues eliciting them may be explained by the species' social organization. Pinyon jays may only adjust their caching behavior when necessary, as they are often surrounded by other individuals. Being less social, Clark's nutcrackers reduce their caching when observed, as they have more opportunities to cache alone and may resort to additional cache protection when experiencing pilferage. Overall, our results provide insight into understanding how pressures associated with the social environment may influence foraging behaviors. Significance statement: To maximize resources, Corvidae will hide food for later consumption and seek out the hidden food of others. These birds also subvert this ecological game of "hide-and-seek" by re-hiding food that other birds know about. We demonstrate that two corvid species initiate "hide-and-seek" in response to different social information. Social pinyon jays re-hide their food after another bird approaches their hiding spots, a proactive response suited for species living in groups, in which attributing food theft to a specific individual may be difficult. Less-social Clark's nutcrackers re-hide food only after seeing another bird steal from them, a reactive response suited for species that typically have more opportunities for privacy when hiding food. We demonstrate corvids adapt to the risk posed by birds "seeking" their food, though which behaviors of the seeker are deemed risky differ between species and are shown to align with ecological demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has yielded success in many research fields. In the last few years, deep learning techniques have been applied in recommender systems to solve cold start and data sparsity problems. However, only a few attempts have been made in social-based recommender systems. In this study, we address this issue and propose a novel recommendation model called Sentiment based Social Neural Hybrid Filtering (S-SNHF). This model combines collaborative and content-based filtering with social information using a deep neural architecture based on Generalized Matrix Factorization (GMF) and Hybrid Multilayer Perceptron (HybMLP). Furthermore, for achieving higher recommendation reliability, the hybrid sentiment analysis model is integrated to analyse users' opinions and infer their preferences. The results of the empirical study performed with three popular datasets show the contribution of both, social information and sentiment analysis on the recommendation performance and that our approach achieves significantly better recommendation accuracy, compared with state-of-the-art recommendation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many social organisms assist their group mates in foraging. The honey bee waggle dance allows nestmates to communicate the locations of rewarding flower patches. This remarkable behaviour can increase colony food collection under certain environmental conditions. However, we know little about how it affects colony foraging distribution in the landscape. Here, we predicted that dance communication influences foraging distances and increases the aggregation of foraging locations. We tested these predictions by manipulating the ability of Apis mellifera colonies situated in a heterogeneous landscape to communicate location information. Following established methodology, six study colonies in observation hives were turned horizontally and exposed to light treatments that produced either oriented or disoriented dancing. After 10–17 days, hives were then turned vertically and allowed to dance under normal conditions. We videoed and decoded dances to compare foraging patterns that had developed during the preceding treatment. This procedure was repeated throughout the foraging season from spring to autumn. Dance decoding revealed that, on average, bees from disoriented colonies recruited for food sources further away than oriented colonies. This effect was consistent throughout the year. Oriented colonies' recruitment was to a smaller area and was more spatially aggregated than that of disoriented colonies. However, experimental treatment did not affect colony weight gain. Our results show that dance communication plays an important role in the spatial distribution of foraging and is potentially beneficial in reducing commuting costs by directing recruits to closer foraging locations. These findings may be particularly relevant in heterogeneous landscapes. • The honey bee waggle dance enables recruitment to smaller foraging areas. • Colonies unable to communicate dance information foraged further from their hives. • The waggle dance is potentially beneficial in reducing commuting costs. • These findings may be particularly relevant in heterogeneous landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When considering a purchase, consumers often augment their private information about a product with anonymous online social information (reviews, etc.). We examine the impact on firm strategy of how consumers weight these two information sources—private and social—in their purchase decisions. An increase in weight on private information always results in higher prices at the interior equilibrium. However, the effects on profits, consumer, and total surplus are nonmonotonic: all increasing with the weight on private information when weight is high but decreasing when weight is low. Profit and surplus decrease with weight when weight is low because a marginal increase in a low weighting leads to a contraction of demand. The dynamic reverses when weight is high. Besides weighting of information sources, our model incorporates the questionable credibility of social information. A firm's optimal investment to improve social information credibility depends on whether consumers process information in a Bayesian or non‐Bayesian manner. We show that, compared to Bayesian consumers, non‐Bayesian consumers endogenously trust (distrust) social information from firms with high(low)‐positivity ratings. This distinction in information processing results in a stark contrast in how firms manage social information credibility: when facing Bayesian consumers, with an increase in the positivity of its social information, a firm with high(low) positivity spends less (more) to improve credibility. On the contrary, when facing non‐Bayesian consumers, a firm with high(low) positivity spends more (less) to improve credibility. Product quality also affects optimal credibility investment, following an inverted U‐shape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative filtering recommendation systems are facing the data sparsity problem associated with interaction data, and social recommendations introduce user social information to alleviate this problem. Existing social recommendation methods cannot express the user interaction interest and social influence deeply, which limits the recommendation performance of the system. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a graph neural network social recommendation algorithm integrating multi-head attention mechanism. First, based on the user-item interaction graph and social network graph, the graph neural network is used to learn the high-order relationship between users and items and deeply extract the latent features of users and items. In the process of learning user embedding vector representation based on the social network graph, the multi-head attention mechanism is introduced to increase the importance of friends with high influence. Then, we make rating predictions for the target users according to the learned user embedding vector representation and item embedding vector. The experimental results on the Epinions dataset show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of both Recall and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspecific cues often provide social information on habitat quality that is considered when deciding to settle at a specific site. The type of sensory cues useful for this will depend on the environment. For amphisbaenians, reptiles adapted to an underground life with highly reduced sight, chemoreception is especially useful to recognize conspecifics. Here, we first analyzed the lipophilic compounds from precloacal gland secretions of the amphisbaenian Blanus cinereus, showing that there were sex- and size-related variations in the proportions of the three major compounds. Then, we tested in the laboratory whether there was an underground site selection based on conspecific chemical cues (substrate scent marks) in two different contexts. In loose substrates, both male and female amphisbaenians tended to choose first the scent-marked substrates more often when the individual that produced the scent, independently of its sex, was relatively larger than the focal individual. In contrast, inside semi-permanent galleries, males, but not females, chose the scent-marked gallery more often when the scent donor, independently of its sex, was relatively smaller. These results suggest that the proportions of compounds in scent marks may allow amphisbaenians to estimate the body size of the producer and that this information affects their site selection decisions. However, the different substrate-dependent responses suggest a different meaning and usefulness of scent marks depending on the context. Significance statement: The presence of your conspecific in a site may indicate that this is a "quality" site to live in. If you are blind and live underground, smell is one of the best options for detecting conspecifics and assessing how good are your surroundings. Here, we test whether a blind amphisbaenian reptile that spends its life buried in sandy substrates uses conspecific chemical stimuli to choose where to settle. We found that this decision is influenced by the microhabitat type, sex, and the size difference between the individual that sniffs and the producer of the scent. Amphisbaenians seem to detect and assess conspecific traits based on the differences in compounds in their odors. Therefore, using conspecific scent to assess habitat quality may help fossorial animals to live underground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a lab experiment, we investigate whether social information can improve the accuracy of self-assessments of relative performance. In particular, we compare the effectiveness of different types of social information: subjects either learn their close peers' (i) average absolute performance, (ii) average self-assessment or (iii) average bias of self-assessments. Additionally, we explore the demand for the different types of social information. Our results suggest that social information can help debiasing subjects' self-assessments, but not all types of information are equally effective. Only learning about the average bias of peers improves self-assessments. Subjects are, in general, willing to pay for social information but mostly prefer information about their peers' absolute performance, which is not helpful. Nevertheless, self-selected information on peers' average bias triggers a stronger reaction to the information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]