Elsevier

Behavioural Processes

Volume 100, November 2013, Pages 123-130
Behavioural Processes

Review
Imitation and local enhancement: Detrimental effects of consensus definitions on analyses of social learning in animals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2013.07.026Get rights and content

Highlights

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    Questions the usefulness of Thorndike's definition of imitation in analyzing animal traditions.

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    Questions the usefulness of the two-action method in demonstrating imitation.

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    Proposes that future studies of imitation use bird-song learning as a model paradigm.

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    Points to serious deficiencies in past research on non-imitative forms of social learning.

Abstract

Development of a widely accepted vocabulary referring to various types of social learning has made important contributions to decades of progress in analyzing the role of socially acquired information in the development of behavioral repertoires. It is argued here that emergence of a consensus vocabulary, while facilitating both communication and research, has also unnecessarily restricted research on social learning. The article has two parts. In the first, I propose that Thorndike, 1898, Thorndike, 1911 definition of imitation as “learning to do an act from seeing it done” has unduly restricted studies of the behavioral processes involved in the propagation of behavior. In part 2, I consider the possibility that success in labeling social learning processes believed to be less cognitively demanding than imitation (e.g. local and stimulus enhancement, social facilitation, etc.) has been mistaken for understanding of those processes, although essentially nothing is known of their stimulus control, development, phylogeny or substrate either behavioral or physiological.

Section snippets

Edward Thorndike and the definition of imitation

Thorndike, 1898, Thorndike, 1911 two classic monographs, both entitled Animal Intelligence and both discussing the implications of the results of his doctoral research, are often read as concerned with the outcomes of a series of experimental investigations of imitation in animals. However, it is important to note that Thorndike did not undertake his thesis to study imitation per se. Rather, Thorndike's goal was to challenge the notion, widely held during the late 19th century (e.g. Romanes,

Part 2: understanding cognitively less demanding social learning

Although for many years many laboratories have examined instances of social learning that are the result of local enhancement, social facilitation, stimulus enhancement, goal emulation, etc. (e.g. Fragaszy and Visalberghi, 1990, Galef and Clark, 1971b, Laland and Plotkin, 1990, Tomasello et al., 1987), such processes have rarely been treated as phenomena worthy of analysis in their own right. Consensus as to the definition of types of social learning believed to reflect cognitive processes less

Conclusion

More than 125 years have passed since George Romanes (1884) observed his coachman's cat open a garden gate and interpreted the cat's behavior as a product of imitation. In intervening decades, extraordinary progress has been made in describing possible mechanisms of social learning, formally modeling social learning processes and understanding the role of social learning in the development of behavioral repertoires of free-living animals. Consensus as to the definition of terms describing

Acknowledgements

I thank Clive Wynne for the invitation to contribute to submit a review paper to Behavioral Processes, Kevin Laland and Elizabeth Lonsdorf and particularly Celia Heyes and Tom Zentall for constructive responses to earlier drafts of this manuscript and Andy Whiten, Tom Zentall and Debbie Constance for feedback on an oral presentation in which much of the material in the present article was presented.

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