Models of the evolution of social learning strategies, which are closely related to cultural evolution, have significantly furthered our understanding of the evolutionary forces that shape learning choices made by individuals in changing environments. However, little of this research has explicitly focused on the process of creativity, focusing instead on the circumstances favoring individual and social learning (e.g., [77–81]). Here, individual learning is often defined
as ‘learning through direct interaction with the environment’ [77,78,80], whereas social learning in this literature is ‘learning though interaction with, or observation of, other individuals or their products’ [82]. Thus, social or individual learning is often defined as trial-and-error learning [79,80]. However, as the sole source of new information in many of these models, individual learning could include other innovative processes, such as instances of creativity where old ideas are combined to make new ones.