As humans, we take for granted that so much of what we know we've learned from others. While social learning is common in the animal kingdom, there is little doubt among scientists that humans are uniquely cultural beings. But what makes humans so uniquely 'cultural?' One possibility is that humans possess an imitation faculty that allows them to abstract a wide range of rules from the actions of others and to remember these rules for a longer period of time than non-human primates (apes). With support from a National Science Foundation CAREER award, Dr. Subiaul will employ a unique imitation learning paradigm that will present human children and apes with identical problems that require them to learn from a model such rules as the order of arbitrary pictures and spatial rules (for example, 'up-down-right'). Though these problems are simple, they involve skills that make cultural learning possible. A better understanding of these abilities will provide us with important insights into what makes our mind like that of other primates and what makes it unique.
To answer such interdisciplinary questions, this award will support the National Zoological Park's Think Tank and Great Ape House, where the research with the non-human primates will be conducted. Dr. Subiaul, in collaboration with the curator of primates, will establish the Ape Mind Initiative - a program that will include students from all educational levels: post-doctoral, graduate, undergraduate and high school. Through this initiative, participating students and the public at large will gain unique knowledge about primate intelligence and the need to protect great apes in their natural habitats so that future generations may benefit from comparative research and the insights it provides into the human mind.
This CAREER award sought to explore two related questions: (1) What are the cognitive underpinnings of imitation? And, (2) Are there cognitive features associated with imitation that are uniquely human? Over the course of 8 years, we addressed these questions in a number of ways. First, my colleagues and I have developed a new framework by which to understand both the evolution and develop of imitation learning. This framework stresses that there is not one but, rather, many imitation mechanisms specialized for copying specific types of rules and responses (Nielsen, Subiaul, Galef, Zentall, & Whiten, 2012; Sherwood, Subiaul, & Zawidzki, 2008; Subiaul, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2012). Second, my colleagues and I have explored using new experimental methods the ability of non-human great apes’ ability to acquire new skills and knowledge by social (vicarious and imitation) as well as asocial (individual) learning (Renner, Price, & Subiaul, Under Revision; Renner & Subiaul, 2014, 2015; Subiaul, Vonk, Okamoto-Barth, & Barth, 2008; Suda-King, Bania, & Subiaul, In Press; Vonk & Subiaul, 2009). Finally, we have studied preschool age children’s ability to learn different types of rules (cognitive v. motor-spatial) and responses by individual trial and error learning, recall following trial and error learning, imitation following a demonstration and emulation following an incorrect demonstration where the child must infer the correct response (Barr et al., 2012; Subiaul, Anderson, Brandt, & Elkins, 2012; Subiaul, Krajkowski, & Price, Under Revision; Subiaul et al., 2007; Subiaul, Patterson, Renner, Schilder, & Barr, 2014; Subiaul, Patterson, & Barr, Under Revision; Subiaul & Schilder, 2014; Subiaul, Vonk, & Rutherford, 2011; Subiaul, Winters, Krumpak, & Core, Under Revision; Subiaul, Zimmermann, Renner, Schilder, & Barr, Under Revision). While research is on-going, these different studies show that humans and great apes share various asocial learning skills, including the ability to encode and recall cognitive and motor-spatial rules following individual trial-and-error learning (e.g., Renner et al., Under Revision). However, in contrast to great apes, young, preschool age children excel at imitating these same types of abstract rules (Renner & Subiaul, 2014, 2015). Such improvements in imitation performance are not just because children are becoming better learners in general. Rather, better imitation performance across different tasks is associated with independent, domain-specific, imitation mechanisms (Subiaul et al., 2014; Subiaul, Zimmermann, et al., Under Revision) which undergo dramatic developmental changes during the preschool years (c.f., Figure 1). But, importantly, the development of these imitation mechanisms is not associated with concomitant developmental changes in social (e.g., emulation) or asocial (recall) learning. Together, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that humans have evolved specialized social learning mechanisms that are specific for imitation learning (Sherwood et al., 2008; Subiaul, 2010a; Subiaul, Renner, & Krakowski, In Press). Based on these results we propose that the evolution of multiple specialized imitation mechanism likely underlies why the range, versatility and fidelity of human imitation is unmatched in the animal kingdom.
