Whether non-primates have the capacity to imitate the behavior of another animal has been a controversial topic.
Cl aims of imitative learning by animals in their natural environment have been numerous; however, for a behavior to be considered imitation, artifacts such as social facilitation and stimulus/local enhancement must be controlled. The two-action method, developed to control for these issues and used successfully to study imitative learning in pigeons and quail, will be used in the present experiments. Experiments 1,2 and 3 will examine the quail's ability to perform conditional discriminations by observing a demonstrator. Experiments 4 will examine whether quail can learn to not imitate a behavior the lead to no reinforcer. Experiments 5, 7 and 8 will examine the quails ability to observe two distinct responses that lead to two different reinforcers and perform whichever response leads to the more desirable outcome, based on its particular motivational state. Experiments 6 and 8 will examine the effectiveness of visual access to a female as a reinforcer in imitative learning. The proposed research is expected to show further evidence that non-primates are capable of true imitative learning and will broaden our current knowledge of true imitative learning in animals.
| Dorrance, Brigette R; Zentall, Thomas R (2002) Imitation of conditional discriminations in pigeons (Columba livia). J Comp Psychol 116:277-85 |
| Dorrance, B R; Zentall, T R (2001) Imitative learning in Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica) depends on the motivational state of the observer quail at the time of observation. J Comp Psychol 115:62-7 |
