📣 Interested in cultural evolution and artificial life? Call for abstracts for our upcoming workshop at @alife2025.bsky.social. Accepted abstracts will be presented as flash talks, and are not archival. Deadline is the September 12, w/ rolling acceptance. Details: sites.google.com/view/planetx... 🧪

been a long time coming, there's now a preprint along with Will Hoppitt describing our new R package for creating, fitting and interpreting bayesian NBDA models (STBayes). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1.... Documentation is here michaelchimento.github.io/STbayes/inde...

that second pic seems Airplane! inspired

We find spatial correlation of bin protections, and characterize the knowledge levels of local SCC (several can open locks!). We also construct a spatially explicit simulation model of two pops of learners to better understand policy effects of coordinated actions to address the problem

📣 preprint klaxon: New study with @dalmaijer.bsky.social @barbaraklump.bsky.social @lucymaplin.bsky.social where we take a closer look at the innovation arms race between cockatoos and residents of Sydney doi.org/10.1101/2025...

This supports longstanding theory that payoff-biased social learning is advantageous when faced with spatial variability. Thanks for reading this far :) /thread

Results from a dynamic learning model suggest that this difference was driven by a payoff-biased social learning strategy when cues had changed, meaning that immigrants were disproportionately influenced by observations of high-payoff options

When payoffs differed (resident option better), residents ignored immigrants, and immigrants adopted the resident preference. The adoption rate was almost immediate when environmental cues had changed (80% of immigrants immediately used resident pref, cf. 25% in symmetric env.)

When payoffs for both options were symmetrical, we found that both immigrants and residents were initially influenced by each other, but this was not enough to drive a permanent change in preferences. Great tits do not conform for the sake of conformity!

Once birds acquired a preference for a 2-option foraging puzzle from a tutor, we moved them into new social groups *with opposing traditions* according to a 2x2 design, where we manipulated environmental cues and the payoff structure of the puzzle

🐦📢🧪 very pleased to share our freshly published cultural diffusion experiment w/ Gustavo Alarcón-Nieto @lucymaplin.bsky.social @ PLOS Biology that explored decision-making of immigrant great tits after moving into a new social group: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

the stapler gets me

3D-SOCS gives access to the minutae of behavior without taking wild animals captive, a *major win for the ethical study of animals*. We used 3D-SOCS to measure great tits' visual field usage with a stimulus display exp. They tend to cock their heads 60 deg when paying attention

🧪 🐦📢 new preprint out with co-first Alex Chan, @lucymaplin.bsky.social and Fumihiro Kano. We present 3DSOCS: a RaspberryPi-powered system for markerless 3D tracking of *wild* birds that can be deployed in the field, runs on batteries! tinyurl.com/2tr774vf

🧪🥳 new preprint with @lucymaplin.bsky.social. in a large-scale cultural diffusion exp (n=144 birds), we find that great tits can assess socially observed payoffs and use that information in their own decision-making when faced with spatial variation biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

God I can't wait

Me on the inside vs me on the outside

This little crested tit survived a year of heavy logging at my field site. Unfortunately it seems like others haven't, as the recapture rate is very low this year and I am missing over half my puzzle solvers from last year :(

It's that time of year again 🤯 improving on last year's pilot of sub millisecond synced camera system. an array of raspi cm4, programmed discipline their framerates to their system clock, which is ptp synced with a gps receiver. Expected result is a fully portable 3d tracking system for small birds