Teaching Young Children And Chimpanzees New Tricks

Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 10 Jan 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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Very little is known how wild chimpanzees learn behaviours such as foraging for food. But new research from the University of St Andrews, published in the Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, has found that chimpanzees are heavily dependent on fellow chimps as role models' to learn new behaviours.

There has been much debate amongst scientists about whether communities of chimpanzees copy behaviour from each other or work out how to carry out tasks themselves. Previous research has found that social learning is divided into imitation' (copying another's actions) and emulation' (learning from the results of another's actions). Past studies have suggested that chimpanzees are emulators rather than imitators which contrasts with human children, who imitate very accurately, so the research group directly compared the ability of four year old children with adult chimpanzees to complete a simple task - sliding a door sideways to reach a reward to see how the behaviour was picked up.

To test the theory of emulation, the research team used ghost scenarios' in which the chimpanzees and children watched the door sliding automatically presenting a clear assessment of emulation over imitation, as there would be no one to copy. The paper found that whilst the apes can and will learn from the results of actions in simple scenarios, they are more heavily dependent on role models (fellow chimps) in more complex situations when compared with human children. The study is the first to directly observe emulation learning' in chimpanzees.

Emulation is less likely to result in accurate behaviours as imitation or copying, but investigating social learning mechanisms in this way is valuable to understand how behaviours are passed on in societies, possibly even giving insight into how behaviours are passed on in human societies.

Royal Society