The Effect of Social Learning on Individual Learning and Evolution
This work addresses the interplay between learning modes and evolution in artificial agents, offering insights into adaptive behaviors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories of social learning in evolutionary contexts.
The study investigated how social learning influences individual learning and genetic evolution in artificial agents, finding that adaptive social and individual learning traits create strong selection pressures that can suppress reproduction or fitness selection, and that social learning enables a decoupled evolutionary system leading to immature agents engaging more in learning.
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure to acquire traits of individual learning and social learning when these are adaptive traits. We show that selection pressure for learning of either kind can supress selection pressure for reproduction or greater fitness. We show that social learning differs from individual learning in that it can support a second evolutionary system that is decoupled from the biological evolutionary system. This decoupling leads to an emergent interaction where immature agents are more likely to engage in learning activities than mature agents.