Simon Reader
Assistant Professor, Social Learning
Biologist Simon Reader specializes in social learning: what, how and why do individuals learn from each other. His work has addressed these issues in rodents, birds, and humans, but most typically uses experiments with zebrafish and guppies. For example, Reader and colleagues recently demonstrated that zebrafish can learn escape routes from experienced conspecifics, and in turn transmit their knowledge to other group members to form a simple ‘tradition’.
Reader is also interested in the evolution of social learning, and the extent to which specialised, derived mechanisms are involved. Together with British colleagues at Cambridge and St. Andrews Universities, he compiled ecologically relevant cognitive measures from multiple domains in 62 primate species. They found evidence for species differences in general intelligence, and concluded that social learning evolved together with primate general intelligence. His group are presently embarking on studies of experimental evolution in fish to build on these and related findings.
During research projects students get acquainted with techniques ranging from behavioural observation and manipulations of early life experience to peptide administration and immunohistochemistry.
“One strength of my research group is our focus on understanding the adaptive tradeoffs and evolution of social behaviour, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms”, Reader says. “Also, with fish as a model we are able to study their social behaviour within large groups of varied and controlled composition – something more challenging in other systems.”