Meta-control of social learning strategies

Social learning, copying other’s behavior without actual experience, offers a cost-effective means of knowledge acquisition. However, it raises the fundamental question of which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals versus the majority. The former and the latter are known respectively as success-based and conformist social learning strategies. We show here that while the success-based strategy fully exploits the benign environment of low uncertainly, it fails in uncertain environments. On the other hand, the conformist strategy can effectively mitigate this adverse effect. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that meta-control of individual and social learning strategies provides effective and sample-efficient learning in volatile and uncertain environments. Simulations on a set of environments with various levels of volatility and uncertainty confirmed our hypothesis. The results imply that meta-control of social learning affords agents the leverage to resolve environmental uncertainty with minimal exploration cost, by exploiting others’ learning as an external knowledge base.Author summary: Which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals or the majority? Seeking a suitable compromise between individual and social learning is crucial for optimum learning in a population. Motivated by the recent findings in neuroscience showing that the brain can arbitrate between different learning strategies, termed meta-control, we propose a meta-control approach in social learning context. First, we show that environmental uncertainty is a crucial predictor of the performance of the individual and two social learning strategies: success-based and conformist. Our meta social learning model uses environmental uncertainty to find a compromise between these two strategies. In simulations on a set of environments with various levels of volatility and uncertainty, we demonstrate that our model outperforms other meta-social learning approaches. In the subsequent evolutionary analysis, we show that our model dominated others in survival rate. Our work provides a new account of the trade-offs between individual, success-based, and conformist learning strategies in multi-agent settings. Critically, our work unveils an optimal social learning strategy to resolve environmental uncertainty with minimal exploration cost.