Blind imitation in pigeons, Columba livia

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.10.026

Animal Behaviour

Volume 72, Issue 2, August 2006, Pages 287-296

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.10.026 Get rights and content

Pigeons that had been trained with a food reward both to peck at and to step on a horizontal plate were allowed to observe a conspecific demonstrator pecking at or stepping on the plate before a test in which the observers were not rewarded for either pecking or stepping. In experiment 1, the demonstrators were not rewarded while being observed. In spite of this, the observers provided evidence of imitation: those that had observed pecking made a greater proportion of pecking responses on test than observers of stepping. In experiment 2, each observer was exposed to a pecking or a stepping conspecific on two occasions. On one occasion, the demonstrator received a food reward for each demonstrated response (continuous reinforcement condition), and on the other the demonstrator's responses were rewarded only rarely (variable interval condition). The observers provided equally strong evidence of imitation in each of these conditions; on test, they made proportionally more of the observed response both when the demonstrators had been richly rewarded and when they had been rarely rewarded. These results show that pigeons engage in ‘blind’ imitation, that is, their imitative behaviour is not always guided by observational learning about response outcomes.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

The first experiment compared the behaviour of two groups of observer pigeons, one that had observed a demonstrator pecking a response plate (Group Peck), and one that had observed a demonstrator stepping on the response plate (Group Step). While being observed, the demonstrators for both groups were responding in extinction; they did not receive any food reward. When Akins & Zentall (1998) allowed quail to observe demonstrators pecking or stepping in extinction, they failed to find evidence of

Experiment 2

Experiment 1 showed that, in an extinction test, pigeons imitate pecking and/or stepping even when they have observed conspecific demonstrators performing these actions without reward. These results suggest that pigeons sometimes engage in blind imitation; they copy observed response topography in the absence of any expectation that performance of the demonstrated action is more likely than performance of the alternative action to have a positive outcome for the actor.

The results of experiment

General discussion

Research using two-action tests has begun to investigate the kinds of learning that mediate imitation in birds. Previous work on this topic has provided compelling evidence of S–R learning by observation in birds. It has shown, using conditional discrimination procedures, that observation of a demonstrator bird performing a response, R, in a particular stimulus context, S, results in the observer forming an S–R association, making the observer more likely to perform R than an alternative

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. We are grateful to David George and Rob Honey for allowing us to use birds they had previously trained, and the automatic response measurement equipment they had developed, and to Dr Colin Walker of the Knox Bird Clinic, Australia for advice regarding crop emptying in pigeons.

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Blind imitation in pigeons, Columba livia

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

General discussion

Acknowledgments

Ethology and Sociobiology

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Animal Behaviour

Advances in the Study of Behavior

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Advances in the Study of Behavior

Animal Behaviour

Cognitive Brain Research

Animal Behaviour

Instrumental responding following reinforcer devaluation

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Imitative learning in male Japanese quail using the two-action method

Journal of Comparative Psychology

Imitation in Japanese quail: the role of demonstrator reinforcement

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

Imitative learning in Japanese quail using the bidirectional control procedure

Animal Learning and Behavior

Effector-dependent learning by observation of a finger movement sequence

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Imitation as behaviour parsing

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B

Detecting, understanding and explaining animal imitation

Imitative learning in Japanese quail depends on the motivational state of the observer quail at the time of observation

Journal of Comparative Psychology

Imitation of conditional discriminations in pigeons

Journal of Comparative Psychology

Western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) use cognitive strategies to protect their caches from thieving conspecifics

Animal Cognition