Bennett G. Galef

Social Learning in Non-primate Mammals

Animal Traditions: Experimental Evidence of Learning by Imitation in an Unlikely Animal

A new field study provides the first experimental evidence of learning by imitation in a free-living animal and demonstrates that social learning can maintain two behavioral traditions in a single population.

Animal Communication: Sniffing Is About More Than Just Smell

A recent study shows that subordinate rats reduce their rate of sniffing while dominants explore their faces thus delaying dominants' subsequent aggression. Sniffing not only facilitates acquisition of olfactory information, but unexpectedly, also serves as a medium for communication.

Social learning of food preferences in rodents: rapid appetitive learning.

A procedure is described for quantitating the transfer of information about inducing increased intake of distinctively-flavored foods or fluids among common laboratory rodents. The method provides a simple, efficient, non-invasive way to produce robust, long-lasting changes in appetitive behaviors of laboratory rodents that can be used in studies of the neuroanatomical, neurochemical or genetic...

Eggs of a female Japanese quail are more likely to be fertilized by a male that she prefers.

Male Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) that conspecific females preferred in a 10-min, forced-choice test of affiliative preference were more likely than were males not preferred in such a test to fertilize females' eggs when subsequently mated with them, although preferred and nonpreferred males mated equally often with females. Further, the probability that a nonpreferred male would fertiliz...