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Increased reliance on socially acquired information while foraging in risky situations?

When choosing foods to eat, rats use both information they acquire as a result of their own sampling and evaluation of available alternatives and information they have acquired previously from others. Formal models (and common sense) suggest that, as potential costs of repeated sampling of alternatives for individual evaluation rises (e.g. in the presence of predators or in environments containing poison foods), dependence on socially acquired information should increase.
We looked at reliance on socially acquired information by rats choosing between two foods both when predators were either present or absent and when subjects had either learned or not learned that some foods in their environment were toxic. We did not find evidence of enhanced reliance on social learning when individual learning was risky. Rather, presence of predators decreased the choosiness of subjects and presence of poison foods had no effect on their use of socially acquired information.