ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Trial-and-error copying of demonstrated actions reveals how fledglings learn to 'imitate' their mothers.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Learning on the job? Foraging strategies of juvenile versus adult Lesser black-backed gulls at their first migratory stopover.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Social demonstration of colour preference improves the learning of associated demonstrated actions.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- The combined role of visual and olfactory cues in foraging byCurrent zoology · 2023Article
- Competitive advantage of rare behaviours induces adaptive diversity rather than social conformity in skill learning.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Juvenile cleaner fish can socially learn the consequences of cheating.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Article
- Cultural transmission in an ever-changing world: trial-and-error copying may be more robust than precise imitation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Complex dynamics of social learning in groups of wild Arabian babblers.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Understanding how humans and other animals learn to perform an act from seeing it done has been a major challenge in the study of social learning. To determine whether this ability is based on 'true imitation', many studies have applied the two-action experimental paradigm, examining whether subjects learn to perform the specific action demonstrated to them. Here, we show that the insights gained from animals' success in two-action experiments may be limited, and that a better understanding is achieved by monitoring subjects' entire behavioural repertoire. Hand-reared house sparrows that followed a model of a mother demonstrator were successful in learning to find seeds hidden under a leaf, using the action demonstrated by the mother (either pushing the leaf or pecking it). However, they also produced behaviours that had not been demonstrated but were nevertheless related to the demonstrated act. This finding suggests that while the learners were clearly influenced by the demonstrator, they did not accurately imitate her. Rather, they used their own behavioural repertoire, gradually fitting it to the demonstrated task solution through trial and error. This process is consistent with recent views on how animals learn to imitate, and may contribute to a unified process-level analysis of social learning mechanisms.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.