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Untrained  chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) fail to imitate novel actions

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tennie2012plosone41548.pdf (7.143Mb)
Date
08/08/2012
Author
Tennie, Claudio
Call, Josep
Tomasello, Michael
Keywords
Cumulative Culture
Enculturated Chimpanzees
Intelligence Hypothesis
Social Cognition
Wild Chimpanzees
Tool-use
Traditions
Children
Apes
Transmission
QL Zoology
BF Psychology
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Abstract
Background: Social learning research in apes has focused on social learning in the technical (problem solving) domain - an approach that confounds action and physical information. Successful subjects in such studies may have been able to perform target actions not as a result of imitation learning but because they had learnt some technical aspect, for example, copying the movements of an apparatus (i.e., different forms of emulation learning). Methods: Here we present data on action copying by non-enculturated and untrained chimpanzees when physical information is removed from demonstrations. To date, only one such study (on gesture copying in a begging context) has been conducted - with negative results. Here we have improved this methodology and have also added non-begging test situations (a possible confound of the earlier study). Both familiar and novel actions were used as targets. Prior to testing, a trained conspecific demonstrator was rewarded for performing target actions in view of observers. All but one of the tested chimpanzees already failed to copy familiar actions. When retested with a novel target action, also the previously successful subject failed to copy - and he did so across several contexts. Conclusion: Chimpanzees do not seem to copy novel actions, and only some ever copy familiar ones. Due to our having tested only non-enculturated and untrained chimpanzees, the performance of our test subjects speak more than most other studies of the general (dis-)ability of chimpanzees to copy actions, and especially novel actions.
Citation
Tennie , C , Call , J & Tomasello , M 2012 , ' Untrained  chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii ) fail to imitate novel actions ' , PLoS One , vol. 7 , no. 8 , 41548 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0041548
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0041548
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2012 Tennie et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
No special funding was needed for this study. Costs were covered by our institute, which had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4609

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