ALLEVAMENTO DI BESTIAME BOVINO IN ITALIA

The research reported in this paper was partly funded by project grants PSI2011-29016-C02-01, PSI2014-51890-C2-1-P (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain) http://www.mineco.gob.es/ and UCM-BSCH GR3/14-940813 (Universidad Complutense de Madrid y Banco Santander Central Hispano) to F. C. A post-doctoral scholarship from Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico / FONDECYT Nº 3140580 awarded to J.ZA. funded his salary. http://www.conicyt.cl/fondecyt. European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant SOMICS agreement n° 609819. Dr. Josep Call.Cetaceans are remarkable for exhibiting group-specific behavioral traditions or cultures in several behavioral domains (e.g., calls, behavioral tactics), and the question of whether they can be acquired socially, for example through imitative processes, remains open. Here we used a “Do as other does” paradigm to experimentally study the ability of a beluga to imitate familiar intransitive (body-oriented) actions demonstrated by a conspecific. The participant was first trained to copy three familiar behaviors on command (training phase) and then was tested for her ability to generalize the learned “Do as the other does” command to a different set of three familiar behaviors (testing phase). We found that the beluga (1) was capable of learning the copy command signal “Do what-the-other-does”; (2) exhibited high matching accuracy for trained behaviors (mean = 84% of correct performance) after making the first successful copy on command; (3) copied successfully the new set of three familiar generalization behaviors that were untrained to the copy command (range of first copy = 12 to 35 trials); and (4) deployed a high level of matching accuracy (mean = 83%) after making the first copy of an untrained behavior on command. This is the first evidence of contextual imitation of intransitive (body-oriented) movements in the beluga and adds to the reported findings on production imitation of sounds in this species and production imitation of sounds and motor actions in several cetaceans, especially dolphins and killer whales. Collectively these findings highlight the notion that cetaceans have a natural propensity at skillfully and proficiently matching the sounds and body movements demonstrated by conspecifics, a fitness-enhancing propensity in the context of cooperative hunting and anti-predatory defense tactics, and of alliance formation strategies that have been documented in these species’ natural habitats. Future work should determine if the beluga can also imitate novel motor actions.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

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

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

Audio File S1 Familiar sounds from Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (<i>Orcinus orca</i>)

One example for each sound: ‘Song’, ‘Blow’ and ‘Birdy’ examples

Audio File S3 Novel Human sounds;RAW DATA from Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (<i>Orcinus orca</i>)

Five randomly chosen examples for each sound: S3.5 ‘One Two Three

Audio File S3 Novel Human sounds from Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (<i>Orcinus orca</i>)

Five randomly chosen examples for each sound: S3.4 ‘One Two

RAW DATA from Imitation of novel conspecific and human speech sounds in the killer whale (<i>Orcinus orca</i>)

RAW DATA Killer Whale Vocal Imitation Z. Abramson et al RSPB­2017­217

Experimental set up.

<p>Two trainers (T_D and T_S; D for demonstrator and S for subject), were positioned on different sides of an opaque panel 2m long x 91cm high placed in a position in which S and D could see each other and their own trainer, but could not see the other trainer’s commands.</p

Total number of trials.

<p>Total number of trials.</p

Behaviors tested in each phase.

<p>Behaviors tested in each phase.</p