Gudenus Lucie Marie, Wein Amelia, Folkertsma Remco, Schwing Raoul
MeiCogSci, Middle European Interdisciplinary Master's in Cognitive Science, University of Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria.
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, 1210 Vienna, Austria.
Animals (Basel). 2024 May 31;14(11):1651. doi: 10.3390/ani14111651.
Social learning describes the acquisition of knowledge through observation of other individuals, and it is fundamental for the development of culture and traditions within human groups. Although previous studies suggest that Kea () benefit from social learning, experimental evidence has been inconclusive, as in a recent two-action task, all perceptual factors were ignored. The present study attempts to address this by investigating social learning in Kea with a focus on social enhancement processes. In an experiment with a captive group of Kea, we investigated whether individuals that had the opportunity to observe a conspecific performing a simple task subsequently show better performance in that task than a control group without prior demonstration. This study provides a strong tendency of greater success in skill acquisition in Kea as a result of social learning. Kea that observed a conspecific solving a task showed clear evidence of perceptual factors drawing attention to the relevant parts of the experimental apparatus and manipulated these significantly more (100% of trials) than control birds (77.8% of trials). Combined with a strong trend ( = 0.056) of the test subjects solving the task more than the control subjects, this shows conclusively that Kea, at least when required to solve a task, do attend to perceptual factors of a demonstrated action.
社会学习描述了通过观察其他个体来获取知识的过程，它是人类群体中文化和传统发展的基础。尽管先前的研究表明啄羊鹦鹉（kea）能从社会学习中受益，但实验证据并不确凿，例如在最近的一项双动作任务中，所有感知因素都被忽略了。本研究试图通过聚焦社会强化过程来研究啄羊鹦鹉的社会学习，以解决这一问题。在一项针对一群圈养啄羊鹦鹉的实验中，我们调查了有机会观察同种个体执行简单任务的个体，随后在该任务中的表现是否比没有事先示范的对照组更好。这项研究提供了有力证据，表明啄羊鹦鹉通过社会学习在技能习得方面有更大成功的强烈趋势。观察到同种个体解决任务的啄羊鹦鹉，有明确证据表明感知因素使它们将注意力吸引到实验装置的相关部分，并且它们对这些部分的操作显著多于对照组鸟类（在100%的试验中），而对照组鸟类只有77.8%的试验会操作。再加上测试对象比对照对象解决任务的趋势较强（P = 0.056），这确凿地表明，至少在需要解决任务时，啄羊鹦鹉确实会关注示范动作的感知因素。
