Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Model-observer similarity, error modeling and social learning in rhesus macaques. |
| Authors: |
Elisabetta Monfardini, Fadila Hadj-Bouziane, Martine Meunier |
| Source: |
PLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 2, p e89825 (2014) |
| Publisher Information: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2014. |
| Publication Year: |
2014 |
| Collection: |
LCC:Medicine
LCC:Science |
| Subject Terms: |
Medicine, Science |
| More Details: |
Monkeys readily learn to discriminate between rewarded and unrewarded items or actions by observing their conspecifics. However, they do not systematically learn from humans. Understanding what makes human-to-monkey transmission of knowledge work or fail could help identify mediators and moderators of social learning that operate regardless of language or culture, and transcend inter-species differences. Do monkeys fail to learn when human models show a behavior too dissimilar from the animals' own, or when they show a faultless performance devoid of error? To address this question, six rhesus macaques trained to find which object within a pair concealed a food reward were successively tested with three models: a familiar conspecific, a 'stimulus-enhancing' human actively drawing the animal's attention to one object of the pair without actually performing the task, and a 'monkey-like' human performing the task in the same way as the monkey model did. Reward was manipulated to ensure that all models showed equal proportions of errors and successes. The 'monkey-like' human model improved the animals' subsequent object discrimination learning as much as a conspecific did, whereas the 'stimulus-enhancing' human model tended on the contrary to retard learning. Modeling errors rather than successes optimized learning from the monkey and 'monkey-like' models, while exacerbating the adverse effect of the 'stimulus-enhancing' model. These findings identify error modeling as a moderator of social learning in monkeys that amplifies the models' influence, whether beneficial or detrimental. By contrast, model-observer similarity in behavior emerged as a mediator of social learning, that is, a prerequisite for a model to work in the first place. The latter finding suggests that, as preverbal infants, macaques need to perceive the model as 'like-me' and that, once this condition is fulfilled, any agent can become an effective model. |
| Document Type: |
article |
| File Description: |
electronic resource |
| Language: |
English |
| ISSN: |
1932-6203 |
| Relation: |
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089825&type=printable; https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203 |
| DOI: |
10.1371/journal.pone.0089825&type=printable |
| DOI: |
10.1371/journal.pone.0089825 |
| Access URL: |
https://doaj.org/article/cd9731aa458846a0af35d793774b596f |
| Accession Number: |
edsdoj.9731aa458846a0af35d793774b596f |
| Database: |
Directory of Open Access Journals |
