Dear all list members, We are happy to announce our recent publication:
*Contextual imitation of intransitive body actions in a Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas): A “do as other does” study * Abstract 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 generali- zation behaviors that were untrained to the copy command (range of first copy = 12 to 35 tri- als); 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 find- ings 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 tac- tics, and of alliance formation strategies that have been documented in these species’ A open access PDF may be obtained from PLOS ONE: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178906#sec014 All the best, José -- Dr. José Fco. Zamorano Abramson. Investigador del Centro de Estudios Avanzados Universidad de Playa Ancha Calle Traslaviña 450, Viña del Mar, Chile http://www.upla.cl/estudiosavanzados/es/investigadores/jose-francisco-zamorano-abramson/ ORCID Id: <http://www.upla.cl/estudiosavanzados/es/investigadores/jose-francisco-zamorano-abramson/> orcid.org/0000-0001-7106-6419 RESEARCHE Id: B-3990-2012 Departamento de Psicobiología Facultad de Psicología Universidad Complutense de Madrid Campus de Somosaguas 28223 Madrid, Spain
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