Evolutionary perspectives on imitation: is a comparative psychology of social learning possible?

Abstract

Studies of imitation in animals have become numerous in recent times, but do they contribute to a comparative psychology of social learning? We review this burgeoning field to identify the problems and prospects for such a goal. Difficulties of two main kinds are identified. First, researchers have tackled questions about social learning from at least three very different theoretical perspectives, the "phylogenetic", "animal model", and "adaptational". We examine the conflicts between them and consider the scope for integration. A second difficulty arises in the methodological approaches used in the discipline. In relation to one of these - survey reviews of published studies - we tabulate and compare the contrasting conclusions of nine articles that together review 36 studies. The basis for authors' disagreements, including the matters of perceptual opacity, novelty, sequential structure, and goal representation, are examined. In relation to the other key method, comparative experimentation, we identify 12 studies that have explicitly compared species' imitative ability on similar tasks. We examine the principal problems of comparing like with like in these studies and consider solutions, the most powerful of which we propose to be the use of a systematic range of task designs, rather than any single "gold standard" task.

Socially learned habituation to human observers in wild chimpanzees

“…In more recent versions of this task, the subject observes either (a) an alternative way to solve the same task, or (b) a 'ghost control' in which the task is solved automatically without a demonstrator (e.g. Over the years, a substantial body of work on social learning among a wide range of species has accumulated, and it is therefore rather surprising that the precise nature of social learning abilities is still hotly debated (Whiten and Ham 1992 ;; Caldwell and Whiten 2002 We addressed this problem through a field study on habituation in wild chimpanzees. Apart from the theoretical issues outlined above, understanding the mechanisms underlying habituation is also important both for methodological reasons and for various applied issues in conservation biology.…”

Behavior and illusions: a model to study superstition in a participant replacement experiment

“…The present methodological approach may contribute to further discussions about social transmission and social learning (e.g., Caldwell & Millen, 2009;Caldwell & Whiten, 2002;Lewis & Laland, 2012). Despite the fact that social transmission can allow successive improvements that accumulate over generations of learners, socially transmitted superstitious behaviors can also prevent improvements from one generation to the next in replacement procedures: the procedure of social exposure contributed to the maintenance of superstitious behavior.…”

On Modeling Proto-Imitation in a Pre-associative Babel

“…• Imitation is a multi-level process found in many different forms of varying degrees of complexity in a vast number of animal species [7]. However, even animals that can imitate cannot learn to communicate at a human-like level of complexity and this is an instance of the major question in cognitive science "what makes humans different from animals" [8].…”