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Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study

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Abstract

Response facilitation has often been portrayed as a “low level” category of social learning, because the demonstrator’s action, which is already in the observer’s repertoire, automatically triggers that same action, rather than induces the learning of a new action. One way to rule out response facilitation consists of introducing a delay between the demonstrator’s behavior and the observer’s response to let their possible effects wear off. However, this may not rule out “delayed response facilitation” in which the subject could be continuously “mentally rehearsing” the demonstrated actions during the waiting period. We used a do-as-the-other-did paradigm in two orcas to study whether they displayed cognitive control regarding their production of familiar actions by (1) introducing a delay ranging from 60 to 150 s between observing and producing the actions and (2) interspersing distractor (non-target) actions performed by the demonstrator and by the subjects during the delay period. These two manipulations were aimed at preventing the mental rehearsal of the observed actions during the delay period. Both orcas copied the model’s target actions on command after various delay periods, and crucially, despite the presence of distractor actions. These findings suggest that orcas are capable of selectively retrieving a representation of an observed action to generate a delayed matching response. Moreover, these results lend further support to the proposal that the subjects’ performance relied not only on a mental representation of the specific actions that were requested to copy, but also flexibly on the abstract and domain general rule requested by the specific “copy command”. Our findings strengthen the view that orcas and other cetaceans are capable of flexible and controlled social learning.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the directors of Parques Reunidos and the Marineland Aquarium of Antibes, Jesús Fernández and Jon Kershaw, for allowing us to conduct this research. Furthermore, we appreciate the work of head coaches Duncan Versteegh and Romain, and the team of orca trainers for their help and support. Special thanks are expressed also to Isabelle Brasseur for her assistance with the trainers team. We want to thank Francisco Serradilla from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid for the video editing. Finally, we sincerely thank the reviewers for taking the time to review an early version of the manuscript and for their constructive feedback that helped to improve the final version. We are especially grateful to the editor, for her thoughtful review and for her very helpful comments.

Funding

This project was conducted at the Marineland Aquarium Antibes, France and supported by a Research Initiation Grant from the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development, FONDECYT no. 11201224 to J.Z.A.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social, Facultad de Gobierno, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile

    José Zamorano-Abramson

  2. Grupo UCM de Psicobiología Social, Evolutiva y Comparada, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28223, Madrid, Spain

    José Zamorano-Abramson, Mª Victoria Hernández-Lloreda & Fernando Colmenares

  3. Departamento de Psicobiología y Metodología de las Ciencias del Comportamiento, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223, Madrid, Spain

    Mª Victoria Hernández-Lloreda & Fernando Colmenares

  4. School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Mary’s Quad, South Street, Fife, St Andrews, KY16 9JP, UK

    Josep Call

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Correspondence to José Zamorano-Abramson.

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The Laboratory Animal Care and Use Committee (CICUAL) of the School of Medicine, Universidad del Desarrollo of Chile (UDD), have approved this research. This research adhered to the legal requirements of the country (France) in which the work was carried out and Marineland institutional guidelines.

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Zamorano-Abramson, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M.V., Colmenares, F. et al. Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study. Anim Cogn 26, 1035–1048 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01756-3

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