Recent findings indicate that the utilization of social information, produced inadvertently by other individuals through their spatial location and/or interaction with the environment, may be ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. If so, social information-mediated effects on population growth and interspecies interactions may be more prevalent than previously thought. However, little is known about how social information may spread among non-grouping individuals, i.e., in animals that do not form cohesive groups and therefore social attraction among group-mates does not facilitate information diffusion. Are there any perception-related, temporal, and/or spatial parameters that may facilitate or limit the spread of social information in temporary aggregations or among dispersed individuals in a population? We argue that living in cohesive groups is not necessarily required for the diffusion of social information and for social information-mediated effects to emerge in a population. We propose that while learning complex problem-solving techniques socially is less likely to occur in non-grouping animals, the spread of adaptive responses to social stimuli, especially to non-visual cues, can be common and may affect population, and/or community dynamics in a wide range of taxa. We also argue that network-based diffusion analysis could be a suitable analytical method for studying information diffusion in future investigations, providing comparable estimations of social effects on information spread to previous studies on group-living animals. We conclude that more studies are warranted to verify what intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence information propagation among incidentally and/or indirectly interacting individuals if we are to better understand the role of social information in animal populations and how the social and ecological characteristics of species are related to information spread in natural communities.

中文翻译：

---

非分组动物中社会信息的扩散

最近的研究结果表明，其他个体通过其空间位置和/或与环境的相互作用无意中产生的社会信息的利用可能在动物王国中无处不在。如果是这样，社会信息对人口增长和种间相互作用的影响可能比以前想象的更普遍。然而，人们对社会信息如何在非分组个体之间传播知之甚少，即在不形成有凝聚力的群体的动物中，因此群体成员之间的社会吸引力不利于信息传播。是否有任何与感知有关的、时间的、和/或可能促进或限制社会信息在临时集合中或在人群中分散的个人之间传播的空间参数？我们认为，生活在有凝聚力的群体中不一定是社会信息传播和社会信息中介效应在人群中出现的必要条件。我们提出，虽然在非分组动物中不太可能在社会上学习复杂的问题解决技术，但对社会刺激的适应性反应的传播，特别是对非视觉线索，可能很常见，并可能影响种群和/或社区广泛的分类群中的动态。我们还认为，基于网络的扩散分析可能是在未来调查中研究信息扩散的合适分析方法，提供对信息传播的社会影响的可比较估计，这些信息传播到先前对群居动物的研究。我们的结论是，如果我们要更好地了解社会信息在动物种群中的作用以及物种的社会和生态特征是如何相关的，则需要进行更多的研究来验证哪些内在和外在因素会影响偶然和/或间接相互作用的个体之间的信息传播到自然社区中传播的信息。