Learning & Behavior
Messages From the Editor

(last updated August 3, 2010)

Special Issue, Volume 38, Issue 3 (August 2010)
Capturing Social Learning in Natural Contexts: Methodological Insights and Implications for Culture

Editorial, Volume 37, Issue 3 (August 2009)

Special Issue, Volume 38, Issue 3 (August 2010)
Capturing Social Learning in Natural Contexts: Methodological Insights and Implications for Culture

Issue 3 of Volume 38 (2010) is a Special Issue in which a distinguished team of Guest Editors has assembled a set of contributions that comprehensively and authoritatively covers our current state of knowledge concerning social learning outside the laboratory.

A central concern is consideration of the implications of current findings from the study of social learning in natural contexts for an understanding of the evolution of cultural capacities in the animal kingdom, of which humans are an integral part. As the editors say in their Introduction, “without an understanding of social learning in the context in which it evolved, we cannot hope to elucidate the interaction between biological and cultural evolution … identification of social learning in free-living populations of animals is a necessary first step.” A special feature of this Special Issue is that it deals fully, both with the new and exciting methods now available to the social-learning researcher, and with the potential and utility of the resulting ecologically valid studies of cultural transmission.

The editors go on to say, “We hope the reader will agree with us that the field of social learning has reached a point where the efforts of researchers from diverse backgrounds, producing a coalescence of statistical tools, field and laboratory approaches and insights regarding a variety of species, are enabling the study of the evolution of culture in ways unimagined when, over half a century ago, social transmission of, naturally occurring and experimentally seeded, innovations was first described in wild populations … Further, as a result of the creation of methodologies allowing valid comparison of humans and nonhumans the present collection of articles may help to bridge the divide between biological anthropologists who often deem social learning sufficient for defining traditions or ’culture’ and social/cultural anthropologists, who most often assert that social learning is necessary, but not sufficient, for the emergence of culture.”

Editorial, Volume 37, Issue 3 (August 2009)

The present editorial team has been receiving manuscripts for almost two years, and this is time enough to allow me to offer some comments on conclusions that we have begun to form over that time.

The first is that the field appears to be in good heart. We have received a steady stream of mostly excellent submissions. Our acceptance rate stands at a fairly stable 50%. Some journals have a much lower rate and wear their figure as a badge of pride; but I am not so sure. That we reject so few (relatively) seems to me to reflect the generally high quality of the work that is sent to us. We receive very few papers that are wholly inappropriate or that fail to provide the basics of a proper experimental design, appropriate analysis, and coherent presentation. For those that we do reject, the problem is usually that the submission is (in the opinion of the editors and reviewers) premature; and it is usually the case that further work can result in a paper that we are happy to see in the pages of Learning & Behavior.

The next point concerns the content of the papers submitted. Our remit is wide; to quote from our Web site:

In fact, the majority of the submissions continue to deal with traditional experimental studies of conditioning, learning, and motivation in nonhuman animals. To the extent that a 2-year period allows one to detect a reliable trend, the only obvious change has been an increase in submissions of studies of learning in human animals (contingency judgment, causal reasoning, and so on). This trend is very welcome; it may be a consequence of the decision to remove the redundant (and, to any biologist, inappropriate) Animal from our title. It would be a pity, however, if this change were to act as a deterrent for those working in other areas. In particular, we would encourage submissions from scientists working in comparative psychology/animal behavior, broadly defined (from complex cognition in primates to habituation in single-celled organisms; from foraging in bees to social behavior in baboons). We believe that all these topics are worthy of our attention, and that principles discovered in one species are likely to be relevant to an understanding of behavior observed in others. We think that Learning & Behavior should provide a forum in which these matters can be aired.

Finally, contributors to the journal may have noted that the installation of the present editorial team has coincided with the change to a Web-based system for submission. This change has had a range of very positive consequences—for the author, the amount of paper to be handled has been much reduced; for the editors and our reviewers, processing of the paper after submission has been substantially streamlined. There have been some teething problems of course (and we are working to eliminate these). We are determined that the benefits of this technology should not be won at the expense of a loss of traditional virtues, in particular, those involved in the personal interaction between editor and author, and editor and reviewer. Publication in a Psychonomic Society journal is a collaborative enterprise that depends on goodwill among all concerned and we will do our best to maintain this.