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. 2016 Aug 4;7:1147. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01147

Table 1.

Summary of points examined in this review.

Transmission process Known influential factors Directions for further studies
Initiation – Producer characteristics (sex, age, dominance rank, and personality, motivation), – Competing solutions to the same problem
– Environment (complexity, stability), – Suboptimal demonstrator characteristics
– Type of innovation – Seeding of information to individuals with different characteristics simultaneously
Pathway – Producer/receiver characteristics As above, and:
– Producer/receiver relationships (kinship, dominance difference, “friendship”) – Several information of varied types (e.g., social/asocial), qualities, relevance, or congruence presented at the same time
– Cognitive abilities (sensory output and processing) – Social structure disturbance/manipulation (e.g., alone/in a social setting)
– Social network (openness, connectedness, tolerance) – Same type of experiments to many different species/groups (including interspecies)
– Adaptive value – Different task complexity/difficulty concurrently
– Information characteristics
Establishment/termination – Cost/benefit ratio, – Comparison between initial transmission and long-term transmission patterns
– Conservatism level
– Social network structure

Additional aspects:
– Technological equipment to track non-invasively: individuals’ movements (GPS, accelerometer), physical states (heart rate monitor, blood glucose or glucocorticoid level monitor, infrared imaging), social proximities [radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags]
– Test apparatus version 2.0 with touch screens or panels, automated feeders, eye-trackers, face recognition
– Long-term population studies
– Heritability/evolution/environmental changes studies
– Taking inspiration in other diffusion domains such as epidemiology, informatics, or social media
– Building a database of protocols, pre-print, and published studies