Is it really imitation? A review of simple mechanisms in social information gathering

• Main Authors: Jason Noble, Peter M. Todd
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Rattus rattus
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.36.3314; http://www-abc.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/users/noble/Research/Social/edReview.ps.gz

Imitation has been of great interest to students of animal social learning, but the power of simpler processes has probably been underestimated. Six classes of simple mechanisms for gaining information from the behaviour of conspecifics are considered: social facilitation, contagious behaviour, stimulus enhancement, observational learning, learning to copy, and cross-modal matching. Possible examples are given of these processes at work in the ecological domains of foraging, mating, predator avoidance, and aggression. An argument is made for the utility of evolutionary simulation models as a complement to empirical research on social learning and social information gathering. 1 Introduction In the pine forests of Israel, black rats Rattus rattus have hit upon a novel feeding technique. They have learned to strip the scales from pine cones, and obtain the nutritious seeds inside (Terkel, 1996). However, there is some question as to how the rats learn to perform this difficult tas.