Definition
Experimentally controlled innovations in behavior are seeded into groups of individuals, and the spread (or otherwise) of the innovation is tracked and documented (Whiten and Mesoudi 2008).
Introduction
One of the most famous examples of a new behavior spreading through a group of animals is undoubtedly the case of tits in England opening milk bottle left on doorsteps. The first reports came in around 1921 in the south of England that tits would flip or pierce open the aluminum cap of milk bottle to drink the cream on top. Many years later this behavior was reported all over England, Wales, Scotland, and continental Europe, in multiple species of birds (Fisher and Hinde 1949; Lefebvre 1995; Aplin 2013b). Another famous example of the diffusion of a novel behavior is the potato and wheat washing of Japanese macaques living on an island off the coast of south-east Japan. Researchers fed...
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Duboscq, J. (2022). Diffusion Studies. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55065-7_1593
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