CHAPTER 3 – Social Enhancement of Food Preferences in Norway Rats: A Brief Review1

Since many years, researchers are engaged in experiments that are designed both to analyze the behavioral processes that permit one Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) to influence another's selection of food and to determine how such social influences might facilitate the development of adaptive feeding repertoires by free-living rats. The relative ease with which social influences on selection of food by rats can be studied in the laboratory has made social transmission of food preferences in rats a particularly fruitful model system to study social learning processes at all stages in the life cycle. A few days after parturition, when infant rats are still totally dependent on their dam for nutriment, they receive information through their mother's milk about flavors of food that she is ingesting. This chapter is designed to review the work describing changes in rats' food preferences following social interactions at a distance from a feeding site with conspecifics that have recently eaten. Studies of social influence on food preference in rats have resulted in the discovery of a previously unsuspected major determinant of diet choice. Such studies have also provided a useful model system to explore the ways in which social interactions can modulate behavioral development. This chapter closes with the conclusion that investigations of social learning processes are likely to provide insight into how locally adaptive patterns of behavior are acquired.