Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, recognize successful actions, but fail to imitate them

Buttelmann, David; Carpenter, Malinda; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael (2013). Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, recognize successful actions, but fail to imitate them. Animal behaviour, 86(4), pp. 755-761. Elsevier 10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.07.015

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Cultural transmission, by definition, involves some form of social learning. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates clearly engage in some forms of social learning enabling some types of cultural transmission, but there is controversy about whether they copy the actual bodily actions of demonstrators. In this study chimpanzees recognized when a human actor was using particular bodily actions that had led to successful problem solving in the past. But then when it was their turn to solve the problem, they did not reproduce the human actor's bodily actions themselves, even though they were clearly capable of producing the movements. These results help us identify more precisely key reasons for the differences in the social learning and cultural transmission of humans and other primates.

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