Imitation in Animals--论文代写范文精选

51Due论文代写网精选essay代写范文：“ Imitation in Animals” 这篇社会essay代写范文讨论了神经科学和心理学,关于工作机制，相比之下,社会学习动物的研究，通常关注真正的模仿和其他表面上类似的行为,特别是在新奇的模仿要求。这篇社会essay代写范文讲述了动物的模仿功能。复杂的实验和理论工作，在不同的动物行为有助于阐明模仿人类发展的本质，在非人类的成人动物。它也揭示了模仿行为的角色文化如何生成和传播，提出了模仿的问题，来解释什么是独特的。

  难找到真正的模仿证据在非人类的动物,怀疑论者认为模仿的能力是人类独有的。但结果显示大猿和猴子,海豚和一些鹦鹉模仿能力强。与动物相关工作的重要性,有必要理解之间的一些区别,模仿其他的社会学习。下面的essay代写范文进行了详述。

Introduction
  Discusses work in neuroscience and psychology concerning what mechanisms could solve the perception-action correspondence problem for imitation. By contrast, studies of social learning in animals often focus on distinguishing true imitation from other superficially similar behaviors, and in particular on the requirement of novelty for imitative learning. Sophisticated experimental and theoretical work on different kinds of copying behavior in animals helps to clarify the nature and varieties of imitation in human development (see vol. 2, part I) and in human adults, as well as in nonhuman animals. It also sheds light on the role of varieties of imitative behavior in the generation and transmission of culture (see vol. 2, part II) and poses the question of how far imitation can explain what is distinctive about human cultural transmission. 

  It has proved remarkably difficult to find evidence of true imitation in nonhuman animals, and for a long while sceptics who regarded the capacity for imitation as exclusively human had the upper hand. A new consensus is emerging as a result of painstaking work showing imitation in some great apes and monkeys (see Byrne, vol. 1, ch. 9 and Whiten et al., vol. 1, ch. 11; see also Voelkl & Huber, 2000), dolphins (Herman, 2002), and birds such as some parrots, corvids, and quail (Pepperberg, 1999; G. Hunt & Gray, 2003; Weir et al., 2002; Akins & Zentall, 1996). Cautious moves are being made to describe continuities along a spectrum from the capacities of other social animals to the interrelated capacities for imitation, mind reading, and language that appear to be characteristically human. 

  To understand the significance of this work with animals, it is necessary to understand some of the distinctions that have been drawn between imitation and other forms of social learning. The concept of ‘‘true imitation’’ is contested, owing in part to the different theoretical aims and methodologies of those concerned with imitation.14 What matters for present purposes is not what deserves this label, but that relevant distinctions be recognized. The most restrictive understanding of true imitation requires that a novel action be learned by observing another perform it, and in addition to novelty, requires a means/ ends structure. You copy the other’s means of achieving her goal, not just her goal or just her movements. 

  A variety of other less cognitively demanding forms of learning in social contexts might look superficially similar. For example, in stimulus enhancement, another’s action draws your attention to a stimulus that triggers an innate or previously learned response; you do not thereby learn a novel action by observing the other. In emulation, by contrast, you observe an- other achieving a goal in a certain way, find that goal attractive, and attempt to achieve it yourself by whatever means (cf. the very different sense of ‘‘emulation’’ used in Grush, 1995 and forthcoming). Individual trialand-error learning may then lead you to the other’s means of achieving the goal. In both stimulus enhancement and emulation, any coincidence of the movements between learner and model is incidental. 

  A further contrast is with mere response priming, as in flocking behavior or contagious yawning, where bodily movements are copied but not as a learned means to a goal. Goal emulation and response priming can be thought of as the ends and means components, respectively, of full-fledged imitation. The distinction between ends and means is not absolute; a movement can be a means to adopting a posture, for example, which may in turn be a means to bring about an effect on an external object or conspecific. We can understand more complex forms of imitation in terms of a structured sequence of means/ends relationships in which one acquires a goal, learns how to achieve it by achieving several subgoals, learns how to achieve the subgoals by certain means, and so on. 

  More complex forms of imitation are methodologically important for animal research (and, as we will see in part III, for research on imitation in human development) because they reduce the plausibility of explanations of mirroring behaviors in terms of mere stimulus enhancement, emulation, or response priming. For example, the more complex the movements modeled in a goal-directed behavior that is emulated, the more implausible it is that trial-and-error learning would reproduce these specific movements. Similarly, certain complex patterns of movement are unlikely to be reproduced by response priming because the learner is unlikely to have a prespecified matching response that merely needs to be triggered. 

  True imitation can make sense of the copying of such complex patterns of movement as the learned means to an end. Response priming, goal emulation, and stimulus enhancement are certainly found in nonhuman animals, and careful experiments are needed to obtain evidence of imitation in a more restricted sense. For this purpose, the two-action experimental paradigm has become the tool of choice. When two models illustrate two different means of obtaining the same attractive result, will animals who observe one or the other model differentially tend to copy the specific method they have seen demonstrated? If not—if they use either method indifferently to achieve the goal, or converge on one method despite the different methods modeled—they may be displaying mere goal emulation plus trial-and-error learning, or stimulus enhancement, rather than imitative learning.

  Psychologist and primatologist Richard Byrne explains some of the limitations of the two-action experimental criterion for imitative learning and in particular questions its usefulness in demonstrating novelty. Success on the two-action criterion, Byrne suggests, is consistent with an alternative account in which a modeled action primes rare preexisting acts in a large repertoire, which may be further amplified by individual trial-and-error learning, so that no imitative learning of a genuinely novel skill has occurred.15 We may note, in addition, that with merely two actions to be distinguished by the learner, even a very partial grasp of the means used by the model may suffice to bias the learner toward that means—and the rest might then be acquired by individual trial-and-error learning. What naturally occurring examples of imitative learning might resist such an alternative explanation? 

  The persistence of a less efficient method of performing a given task in a particular population, such as apes using one short stick instead of two long sticks to fish out insects, might be evidence for imitative as opposed to trial-and-error learning. But, as Byrne explains, it will be hard to rule out the possibility that environmental differences rather than imitation explain such behavioral differences among populations. He finds better evidence for imitative learning of novel skills in his field observations of what he calls program-level imitation, in which animals imitatively learn a specific organization of a complex process. Gorillas, he argues, learn to prepare particular types of plants for eating using a standardized, complex organization of manual processing stages, despite idiosyncratic lower-level differences among individual gorillas; the standard processing pattern is even learned by gorillas whose hands have been maimed by snares, who might be expected to find different processing techniques through individual trial-and-error learning. Byrne argues that such program-level imitation cannot be explained in terms of socially guided priming, emulation, and trial-and-error learning; it illustrates imitative learning of genuinely novel skills.16 This capacity to transmit complex techniques for processing food, he suggests, may have helped apes compete with monkeys in exploiting shared food resources, despite the lesser mobility and other feeding disadvantages of apes.

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