Imitative learning

Imitative learning is a type of social learning whereby new behaviors are acquired via imitation. Imitation aids in communication, social interaction, and the ability to modulate one's emotions to account for the emotions of others, and is "essential for healthy sensorimotor development and social functioning". The ability to match one's actions to those observed in others occurs in humans and animals; imitative learning plays an important role in humans in cultural development. Imitative learning is different from observational learning in that it requires a duplication of the behaviour exhibited by the model, whereas observational learning can occur when the learner observes an unwanted behaviour and its subsequent consequences and as a result learns to avoid that behaviour.

Imitative learning in animals

On the most basic level, research performed by A.L. Saggerson, David N. George, and R.C. Honey showed that pigeons were able to learn a basic process that would lead to the delivery of a reward by watching a demonstrator pigeon. A demonstrator pigeon was trained to peck a panel in response to one stimulus (e.g. a red light) and hop on the panel in response to a second stimulus (e.g. a green light). After proficiency in this task was established in the demonstrator pigeon, other learner pigeons were placed in a video-monitored observation chamber. After every second observed trial, these learner pigeons were then individually placed in the demonstrator pigeon's box and presented the same test. The learner pigeons displayed competent performance on the task, and thus it was concluded that the learner pigeons had formed a response-outcome association while observing. However, the researchers noted that an alternative interpretation of these results could be that the learner pigeons had instead acquired outcome-response associations that guided their behavior and that further testing was needed to establish if this was a valid alternative.

A similar study was conducted by Chesler, which compared kittens learning to press a lever for food after seeing their mother do it to kittens who had not. A stimulus in the form of a flickering light was presented, after which the kitten has to press a lever in order to obtain a food reward. The experiment tested the responses of three groups of kittens: those that observed their mother's performance first before attempting the task, those that observed a strange female's performance, and those that did not have a demonstrator and had to complete it through trial and error (the control group). The study found that the kittens that observed their mother before attempting the task acquired the lever-pressing response faster than the kittens that observed a strange female's response. The kittens conducting the task through trial and error never acquired the response. This result suggests that the kittens learned from imitating a model. The study also speculates whether the primacy of imitative learning, as opposed to trial end error, was due to a social and biological response to the mother (a type of learning bias).

Whether true imitation occurs in animals is a debated topic. For an action to be an instance of imitative learning, an animal must observe and reproduce the specific pattern of movements produced by the model. Some researchers have proposed evidence that true imitation does not occur in non-primates, and that the observational learning exhibited involves less cognitively complex means such as stimulus enhancement.

Chimpanzees are more apt to learning by emulation rather than true imitation. The exception is encultured chimpanzees, which are chimpanzees raised as if they were children. In one study by Buttelman et al, encultured chimpanzees were found to behave similarly to young children and imitate even those actions that were non instrumental to achieving the desired goal. In other studies of true imitation, encultered chimpanzees even imitated the behaviour of a model some time after initially observing it.