Imitation of Novel Intransitive Body Actions in a Beluga Whale (Delphinapterus leucas): A "Do as Other Does" Study.

Cetaceans are well known for their unique behavioral habits, such as calls and tactics. The possibility that these are acquired through social learning continues to be explored. This study investigates the ability of a young beluga whale to imitate novel behaviors. Using a do-as-other-does paradigm, the subject observed the performance of a conspecific demonstrator involving familiar and novel behaviors. The subject: (1) learned a specific 'copy' command; (2) copied 100% of the demonstrator's familiar behaviors and accurately reproduced two out of three novel actions; (3) achieved full matches on the first trial for a subset of familiar behaviors; and (4) demonstrated proficiency in coping with each familiar behavior as well as the two novel behaviors. This study provides the first experimental evidence of a beluga whale's ability to imitate novel intransitive (non-object-oriented) body movements on command. These results contribute to our understanding of the remarkable ability of cetaceans, including dolphins, orcas, and now beluga whales, to engage in multimodal imitation involving sounds and movements. This ability, rarely documented in non-human animals, has significant implications for the development of survival strategies, such as the acquisition of knowledge about natal philopatry, migration routes, and traditional feeding areas, among these marine mammals.

Cognition and Culture in Evolutionary Context.

In humans and other animals, the individuals' ability to adapt efficiently and effectively to the niches they have actively contributed to construct relies heavily on an evolved psychology which has been shaped by biological, social, and cultural processes over evolutionary time. As expected, although many of the behavioral and cognitive components of this evolved psychology are widely shared across species, many others are species-unique. Although many animal species are known to acquire group-specific traditions (or cultures) via social learning, human culture is unique in terms of its contents and characteristics (observable and unobservable products, cumulative effects, norm conformity, and norm enforcement) and of its cognitive underpinnings (imitation, instructed teaching, and language). Here we provide a brief overview of some of the issues that are currently tackled in the field. We also highlight some of the strengths of a biological, comparative, non-anthropocentric and evolutionarily grounded approach to the study of culture. The main contributions of this approach to the science of culture are its emphasis (a) on the integration of information on mechanisms, function, and evolution, and on mechanistic factors located at different levels of the biological hierarchy, and (b) on the search for general principles that account for commonalities and differences between species, both in the cultural products and in the processes of innovation, dissemination, and accumulation involved that operate during developmental and evolutionary timespans.

An interview with Michael Tomasello: cooperation and human cognition

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Cognition and culture in evolutionary context

In humans and other animals, the individuals’ ability to adapt efficiently and effectively to the niches they have actively contributed to construct relies heavily on an evolved psychology which has been shaped by biological, social, and cultural processes over evolutionary time. As expected, although many of the behavioral and cognitive components of this evolved psychology are widely shared across species, many others are species-unique. Although many animal species are known to acquire group-specific traditions (or cultures) via social learning, human culture is unique in terms of its contents and characteristics (observable and unobservable products, cumulative effects, norm conformity, and norm enforcement) and of its cognitive underpinnings (imitation, instructed teaching, and language). Here we provide a brief overview of some of the issues that are currently tackled in the field. We also highlight some of the strengths of a biological, comparative, non-anthropocentric and evolutionarily grounded approach to the study of culture. The main contributions of this approach to the science of culture are its emphasis (a) on the integration of information on mechanisms, function, and evolution, and on mechanistic factors located at different levels of the biological hierarchy, and (b) on the search for general principles that account for commonalities and differences between species, both in the cultural products and in the processes of innovation, dissemination, and accumulation involved that operate during developmental and evolutionary timespans (AU)

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Two and a half-year-old children are prosocial even when their partners are not.

A total of 33 2.5-year-old toddlers were tested for proactive and selective prosocial responding in an iterated Prosocial Game with unfamiliar adult partners who were communicatively neutral and alternated their roles as actors and recipients every other trial. When children were actors, they were required to choose, at no cost to themselves, between a selfish option that delivered a reward to them only (1/0) and a prosocial option that delivered identical rewards to both themselves and their partners (1/1). When adult partners were actors, they consistently behaved prosocially (1/1) or selfishly (1/0) over 10 alternating trials, depending on test condition. An additional 17 children were used as a recipient-absent control group to test for self-oriented versus other-oriented prosocial preferences. This study shows that by 2.5 years of age, and in the particular context of the task administered, toddlers can display proactive, other-oriented prosocial behavior, but their prosocial responding is indiscriminate in that they fail to respond contingently to their partners' prosocial or selfish behavior in the previous trials. These findings lend further support to the view that human prosociality is in place early in development as a basic tendency to be nice to others. This inclination may be so strong that not even partners who are communicatively neutral or repeatedly selfish toward children can erode it. They also suggest that this precocious proactive prosociality may be independent of reciprocity in terms of both its developmental schedule and psychological scaffolding.

The structure of individual differences in the cognitive abilities of children and chimpanzees.

Most studies of animal cognition focus on group performance and neglect individual differences and the correlational structure of cognitive abilities. Moreover, no previous studies have compared the correlational structure of cognitive abilities in nonhuman animals and humans. We compared the structure of individual differences of 106 chimpanzees and 105 two-year-old human children using 15 cognitive tasks that posed problems about the physical or social world. We found a similar factor of spatial cognition for the two species. But whereas the chimpanzees had only a single factor in addition to spatial cognition, the children had two distinct additional factors: one for physical cognition and one for social cognition. These findings, in combination with previous research, support the proposal that humans share many cognitive skills with nonhuman apes, especially for dealing with the physical world, but in addition have evolved some specialized skills of social cognition.

Regularities and diversity in developmental pathways: mother-infant relationships in hamadryas baboons.

Change, stasis, stability, discontinuity, orderliness, and diversity are all potential characteristics of developmental systems. This study uses multilevel modeling to characterize the normative developmental pathways of the early social relationships of 23 mother-infant pairs embedded in a multilayered colony of hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas hamadryas). The relationships were assessed by means of 27 behavioral measures that were collected during 100-220 focal sampling sessions per infant, from birth to 380 days of age (25 two-week age intervals). Seventy four percent of the behavioral measures exhibited an age-related pattern. Infant age, however, was not predictive of the rate of the behaviors relating to the management of mother-infant conflicts. This study provides empirical evidence that the development of mother-infant relationships may involve periods of change and stasis, overall orderliness, and diversity as well as canalization of developmental pathways. We believe that growth curve analysis can be useful to tackle various hot issues in the study of behavioral development.

Mother-infant relationships in baboons (Papio hamadryas): predictors of differences and discontinuities in developmental pathways.

This study uses hierarchical linear regression modeling to analyze sources of variation in the developmental pathways of mother-infant relationships and to search for behavioral discontinuities. The data come from 23 mother-infant dyads of baboons (Papio hamadryas), whose interactions were recorded longitudinally during the infants' 1st year of life. The infant's sex and the mother's age and reproductive experience accounted for part of the variation observed in the developmental pathways of 11 of 20 behavioral measures analyzed; however, some of them did so only in some periods but not in others. The authors proposed that this can reflect the occurrence of reorganizations or discontinuities in the mother-infant relationship that can be related to important life events such as the mother's resumption of sexual activity.

Application of piecewise hierarchical linear growth modeling to the study of continuity in behavioral development of baboons (Papio hamadryas).

In behavioral science, developmental discontinuities are thought to arise when the association between an outcome measure and the underlying process changes over time. Sudden changes in behavior across time are often taken to indicate that a reorganization in the outcome-process relationship may have occurred. The authors proposed in this article the use of piecewise hierarchical linear growth modeling as a statistical methodology to search for discontinuities in behavioral development and illustrated its possibilities by applying 2-piece hierarchical linear models to the study of developmental trajectories of baboon (Papio hamadryas) mothers' behavior during their infants' 1st year of life. The authors provided empirical evidence that piecewise growth modeling can be used to determine whether abrupt changes in development trajectories are tied to changes in the underlying process.

Modelos jerárquicos "por piezas" en el análisis de la relación entrediscontinuidad conductual y discontinuidad en procesos subyacentes / Piecewise hierarchical modelling and the assessment of the relation between discontinuity in behavioural outcomes and discontinuity in the underlying process

Todo sistema, y por tanto cualquier sistema social, está sometido a un proceso constante de cambio a lo largo del tiempo. El estudio del desarrollo ya sea individual o social ha sido un campo plagado de problemas tanto teóricos como metodológicos. Una de las polémicas tradicionales en el estudio del desarrollo es la que se refiere a la naturaleza del mismo, esto es, si el cambio que se produce durante la ontogenia es de naturaleza continua o discontinua, con las implicaciones que esto tiene sobre el papel de las experiencias previas sobre el comportamiento posterior del individuo o sistema social del que se trate. El estudio de la continuidad en el desarrollo ha tenido como una importante fuente de datos el estudio de la conducta observable, infiriéndose a partir de los cambios en la misma, cambios en los procesos subyacentes. Ahora bien, la ausencia de isomorfismo entre conducta y procesos ha sido ampliamente documentada, lo que cuestiona la inferencia directa de discontinuidades en los procesos a partir de discontinuidades en la conducta observada. En este trabajo proponemos el uso de modelos de regresión jerárquicos "por piezas" como una herramienta de gran utilidad en el estudio de la relación entre discontinuidades conductuales y discontinuidades en los procesos subyacentes. Presentamos el modelo general y ejemplificamos su uso con datos de relación madre-cría en primates no humanos procedentes de un estudio longitudinal (AU)