Research

CCE (Aplin) Lab

Research Overview

We are interested in the interaction between cognition, social dynamics and animal culture. Do individual biases shape social structures and transmission of information between individuals? How does social structure shape the speed at which information spreads, and the emergent patterning of culture?

We are certified bird nuts, so while all study systems have their pros and cons, our work is on birds (parid & parrot species). The study of the spread of innovations also naturally leads to species that might be considered "success stories" - highly adaptable species that used their behavioural and cognitive flexibility to expand their population size and range under anthropogenic change. So almost incidentally, much of our work has ended up focusing on birds in urban areas.

Figure from Aplin (2016) Current Opinions

Our current work is focused around three projects. Find out more on their separate pages:

Previous research has explored these questions through a series of related projects:

We studied individual variation in social behaviour and the emergent consequences, using a multi-faceted approach to look at personality, consistency in social phenotypes, personality and foraging dynamics, and social network structure and stability.
We investigated the role of social networks in the transmission of information in the wild, using information about the discovery of food patches (also across environments and species).
We experimentally seeded a new foraging behaviour into wild populations of great tits, using automated tracking and puzzle-boxes to study the emergence, spread and persistence of culture. We showed that some individuals will opt out of social learning, adopting scrounging strategies that are bimodally distributed across the population.
More recently, we have manipulated the rewards associated with this foraging tradition to ask whether environmental change leads to maladaptive traditions.
Animal culture is widespread, In collaborative work, we argue that animal culture is important for conservation.