Abstract
Cetaceans are remarkable for exhibiting group-specific behavioral traditions or cultures in several behavioral domains (e.g., calls, behavioral tactics), and the question of whether they can be acquired socially, for example through imitative processes, remains open. Here we used a “Do as other does” paradigm to experimentally study the ability of a beluga to imitate familiar intransitive (body-oriented) actions demonstrated by a conspecific. The participant was first trained to copy three familiar behaviors on command (training phase) and then was tested for her ability to generalize the learned “Do as the other does” command to a different set of three familiar behaviors (testing phase). We found that the beluga (1) was capable of learning the copy command signal “Do what-the-other-does”; (2) exhibited high matching accuracy for trained behaviors (mean = 84% of correct performance) after making the first successful copy on command; (3) copied successfully the new set of three familiar generalization behaviors that were untrained to the copy command (range of first copy = 12 to 35 trials); and (4) deployed a high level of matching accuracy (mean = 83%) after making the first copy of an untrained behavior on command. This is the first evidence of contextual imitation of intransitive (body-oriented) movements in the beluga and adds to the reported findings on production imitation of sounds in this species and production imitation of sounds and motor actions in several cetaceans, especially dolphins and killer whales. Collectively these findings highlight the notion that cetaceans have a natural propensity at skillfully and proficiently matching the sounds and body movements demonstrated by conspecifics, a fitness-enhancing propensity in the context of cooperative hunting and anti-predatory defense tactics, and of alliance formation strategies that have been documented in these species’ natural habitats. Future work should determine if the beluga can also imitate novel motor actions.
Highlights
Cetaceans are long-lived, large-brained, cognitively advanced, and highly sociable, and flexibly cooperative animals [1,2,3] that live in ecological scenarios where the problems of survival and reproduction are better solved socially [4,5]
Researchers generally agree that social learning is not a unitary process, and the published taxonomies of social learning explicitly acknowledge that different forms of social learning can potentially be driven by psychological processes that vary in its computational demands [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
The criteria required for generalizing the copy command (“Do what the other does!”) for these three untrained behaviors was that the subject performed above chance in Imitation of intransitive body actions in a Beluga whale producing exact matches of the three behaviors
Summary
Cetaceans are long-lived, large-brained, cognitively advanced, and highly sociable, and flexibly cooperative animals [1,2,3] that live in ecological scenarios where the problems of survival (as predators and preys) and reproduction are better solved socially [4,5]. The demonstrated behavior that is copied by the observer can be familiar versus novel, and transitive (object-oriented) versus intransitive (body-oriented) These distinctions may well reflect the engagement of different cognitive processes [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24]. The copying of so-called transparent or transitive actions is hypothesized to engage cognitive skills that can (at least partly) be different from those required to match opaque or intransitive actions [11,15,22,24,26] Perhaps this may explain the mixed results obtained in experiments on contextual imitation in dogs that appeared to be influenced by whether the demonstrated actions were transitive [27] or intransitive [28,29]
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