Original title: Cumulative culture can emerge from collective intelligence in animal groups
Researchers tested homing pigeons in groups, repeatedly replacing group members to create successive generations. The groups' homing performanceHow effectively pigeons find their way back home. improved over generations, and later groups did better than solo pigeons and groups whose membership stayed fixed. Routes were more alike between neighboring generations in the same group chain than between separate chains, which points to knowledge passing between generations. This suggests group intelligence can build on earlier improvements over time.
Imagine a relay team where each runner passes a route tip to the next person. The hard part is knowing whether later runners improve because of those tips or for some other reason. In this paper, replacing pigeons creates successive groups, and the routes they take show whether useful knowledge carries from one group to the next.
Animal groups may improve not only by combining what members know now, but by passing useful changes to later groups. That gives researchers a way to study how shared knowledge can build up over time, even in animals without complex cognition.
The abstract describes homing pigeons and experimental groups, so it does not establish that the same pattern occurs in other animals or settings. It reports evidence of cross-generational knowledge transfer but does not specify the exact mechanism by which pigeons pass on route information.
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Cumulative culture can emerge from collective intelligence in animal groups — Takao Sasaki, Dora Biro — Nature Communications — doi:10.1038/ncomms15049
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.