Imitation and observational learning

One reason why Thorndike adopted such a narrow, behavioral view of learning was that he looked for evidence of other forms of learning without success. Having taught one cat to escape from the puzzle box by operating a latch, he looked to see whether a second cat would acquire the correct solution simply by watching the first. A series of such experiments produced uniformly negative results, and Thorndike concluded that trial and error was the only form of learning available to animals other than humans.

Why Thorndike should have been so unsuccessful is something of a mystery, for later experiments have established quite convincingly that animals can often benefit from watching another member of their species perform a particular task. Casual observation in natural settings, for instance, reveals that young chimpanzees intently watch their elders perform intricate tasks; this certainly suggests that learning by observation is very common in some species.

Experimental analysis has revealed a number of important distinctions concerning the role of observation in behaviour. For example, domestic chickens that have eaten to satiation a particular source of food will start eating again if they observe other chickens feeding. Although the observation of conspecifics engaged in a particular activity has clearly affected the tendency of the satiated chicken to engage in that activity, it is not clear what they might have learned from this observation. They already know how to peck, and they already know that the grain before them is palatable food. It is probably more appropriate to regard this as an instance of “social facilitation” and to say that one of the stimuli that elicits feeding in chickens is the sight of other chickens feeding.

The example above demonstrates the minimum requirement for establishing that an animal has learned by observation: in the absence of the opportunity to observe another, the animal must have been unlikely to have performed a particular response, and the reason for this must reside in lack of knowledge. An artificial, laboratory example of observational learning would be to allow an observer rat to watch a demonstrator rat pressing a lever for food. If the observer has never before pressed a lever and, given the opportunity, now does so much more rapidly than another rat denied the opportunity to observe the demonstrator, surely some genuine observational learning has occurred. But even here it remains difficult to establish exactly what it is that the observer has learned by watching the demonstrator, and more elaborate experiments may be required to elucidate this. An experiment with two monkeys showed how this may be done. The monkeys took turns acting as demonstrator and observer. The demonstrator’s task was to choose between two objects, one of which contained some hidden food. Since the objects were changed on each new trial for the demonstrator, there was no way for the animal to know which choice was correct, and it necessarily picked one at random. The observer, however, could watch the demonstrator’s trial and thus could find out which of the two objects in a particular set was correct. Given an opportunity to choose between the two, the observer more often than not chose correctly. That the observer was not simply watching the demonstrator, but was in fact looking to see the outcome of the choice, is established by the finding that the observer performed somewhat more accurately on those trials when the demonstrator’s choice was wrong than on those when it was right.

This last finding points to a further distinction, that between observing the actions of another and imitating those actions. In this particular experiment, the monkeys clearly were not imitating one another, or they would have copied each other’s choices even when these were wrong. A demonstration of imitation is provided by the behaviour of oystercatchers feeding on mussels. Having found a mussel, an adult oystercatcher obtains the food from within either by inserting its beak in the right place and cutting the muscle that holds the shell together or by pecking a hole in the weakest point of the shell. Young birds develop the method employed by their parents, but experiments in which chicks were fostered by adults with a different habit from that of the natural parents have established that this behaviour is not genetically determined. Rather, the young birds imitate the actions they observe being performed by their foster parents.

The best known natural example of such imitation was provided by a troop of macaques in Japan. In order to lure the monkeys out of the forest and into the open, where their behaviour could be better studied, scientists routinely left sweet potatoes and wheat on the beach. The monkeys ate this food but clearly disliked the fact that it had become liberally mixed with sand. A young female member of the troop, however, discovered that sweet potatoes could readily be washed free of sand, and that a handful of wheat and sand could be thrown into a pool, where the sand would sink, leaving the wheat floating behind. Both customs spread through the troop, first to the immediate family and young companions of the original inventor, and last of all (an interesting touch) to the old, conservative males. Other examples of observational learning are readily apparent in the behaviour of animals in the field, but in many cases, as in some of the laboratory studies cited above, it remains difficult to elucidate just what it is that has been learned.

Song learning

A special case of observational learning is that of young birds acquiring their species-typical song. Numerous species of animals, including many birds, produce species-typical calls or other vocalizations as adults; in many cases, however, there is little evidence that learning plays any significant role in their development. In many species of crickets, for example, the song is stereotyped, and the pattern of neural activity that produces the song can be detected even in young animals who neither sing nor apparently react to the adult song. But in most songbirds, there is reason to believe that learning has a significant effect on the development of the adult song.

The interesting feature of this learning is that it sometimes occurs in two distinct phases separated by several months. The first of these can be regarded as purely observational learning, the second as the perfection of the song through practice (i.e., as imitation of a model). Song sparrows, for example, do not develop a normal adult song unless they have the opportunity to hear the song during their first autumn. There is thus a sensitive period during which they must hear their species’ song if they are to develop normally, but it is important to note that they do not themselves sing at all during the first autumn. It is not until the next spring that they start practicing the song. At this point, they do not need to hear other sparrows singing, but they do need to hear themselves. If the bird is deafened before it starts practicing, only a very crude song emerges. The implication is that, during exposure in the first autumn, the sparrow learns to identify the detailed song and establishes a template of it; the following spring, the sparrow starts singing and needs practice to match its output to the stored template.

The song sparrow provides an example of a particularly clear separation between observation and imitation. In other species, such as the chaffinch, the young bird learns from exposure to song in the first autumn, but refinement of the song is produced by further exposure to other chaffinches singing during the following spring. In yet others, such as indigo buntings, the adult bird learns its song from territorial neighbours. But even where there is no temporal separation between the two aspects of learning, it still seems valid to distinguish between the learning involved in establishing the template and that involved in perfecting the motor skill.

If song learning consists solely of the young bird learning to reproduce the adult, species-typical song, one might wonder why any learning should be necessary at all. Why should the song not develop simply through maturation, or, in other words, why is not the template, at least, genetically laid down in the bird’s brain? In fact, studies indicate that a relatively crude template is innately determined in most species. There are very strict limits to the range of songs that a bird of one species can learn. Moreover, among chaffinches and certain other species, even if a young bird hears no song at all it will still develop a crude song that has recognizable features of the full, species-typical one. The degree of this innate specification varies widely from species to species: at one extreme are such birds as cuckoos, which develop a standard call with no prior exposure at all; at the other extreme are such birds as marsh warblers, which develop idiosyncratic songs picked up, it seems, from any other species they come in contact with during the sensitive period.

Species whose song acquisition involves a great deal of individual learning are probably those in which individual birds develop slightly different songs. In some species, such as song sparrows, there are recognizable local “dialects” that the young birds learn from adults living in the same region. In other species, there is even more variation between individuals. If one function of the song is to attract a mate, then an interplay is called for between a song that simply advertises the singer’s species and one that establishes his individual identity. The importance of individual learning, then, depends on the role of the song in the mating patterns of the species.