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Cognitive imitation in 2-year-old children (Homo sapiens): a comparison with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)

Animal Cognition volume 10, pages 369–375 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Here we compare the performance of 2-year-old human children with that of adult rhesus macaques on a cognitive imitation task. The task was to respond, in a particular order, to arbitrary sets of photographs that were presented simultaneously on a touch sensitive video monitor. Because the spatial position of list items was varied from trial to trial, subjects could not learn this task as a series of specific motor responses. On some lists, subjects with no knowledge of the ordinal position of the items were given the opportunity to learn the order of those items by observing an expert model. Children, like monkeys, learned new lists more rapidly in a social condition where they had the opportunity to observe an experienced model perform the list in question, than under a baseline condition in which they had to learn new lists entirely by trial and error. No differences were observed between the accuracy of each species’ responses to individual items or in the frequencies with which they made different types of errors. These results provide clear evidence that monkeys and humans share the ability to imitate novel cognitive rules (cognitive imitation).

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. In the event that participants did not discover the serial position of list items within 20-trials, the total number of responses from the beginning to the end of the session were recorded.

  2. Social facilitation as an explanation for the performance of non-human primates in the social condition was ruled out by a control condition in which the expert student executed a different new list while being observed by the student in the presence of another monkey (Subiaul et al. 2004).

  3. We did not use the ghost condition because the crucial parameters for that condition are not yet known and because it’s not clear why monkeys (and other animals) fail to learn under the ghost condition. Future research should directly address whether varying the salience of the computer’s responses yield results different from the negative results reported by Subiaul et al. (2004, Exp 3) and others.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all members of the Primate Cognition Lab, the staff of the Centre for Toddler Development, and Jennifer Vonk and Daniel J. Povineilli of the Cognitive Evolution Group for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. This study was supported in part by a gift from the Herb and Sheri Lurie Foundation to F. Subiaul, an NIMH grant (R01 MH40462) to H. Terrace and by a James McDonnell Foundation grant to H.Terrace, J. Metcalfe and F. Subiaul.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The George Washington University, 1922 F Street, NW # 406E, Washington, DC, 20001, USA

    Francys Subiaul

  2. Department of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Kathryn Romansky & Herbert Terrace

  3. Duke University, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Durham, NC, USA

    J. F. Cantlon

  4. Center for Toddler Development, Barnard College, New York, NY, USA

    Tovah Klein

  5. New York Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Herbert Terrace

Authors
  1. Francys Subiaul
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  2. Kathryn Romansky
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  3. J. F. Cantlon
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  4. Tovah Klein
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  5. Herbert Terrace
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Correspondence to Francys Subiaul.

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Subiaul, F., Romansky, K., Cantlon, J. . et al. Cognitive imitation in 2-year-old children (Homo sapiens): a comparison with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Anim Cogn 10, 369–375 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-006-0070-3

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Keywords

  • Comparative psychology
  • Social learning
  • Cognitive imitation