Identifying teaching in wild animals |
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Authors: | Alex Thornton and Nichola J Raihani |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, CB2 3EJ Cambridge, England;(2) Institute of Zoology, Zooligical Society of London, London, England |
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Abstract: | After a long period of neglect, the study of teaching in nonhuman animals is beginning to take a more prominent role in research
on social learning. Unlike other forms of social learning, teaching requires knowledgeable individuals to play an active role
in facilitating learning by the naive. Casting aside anthropocentric requirements for cognitive mechanisms assumed to underpin
teaching in our own species, researchers are now beginning to discover evidence for teaching across a wide range of taxa.
Nevertheless, unequivocal evidence for teaching remains scarce, with convincing experimental data limited to meerkats, pied
babblers, and tandem-running ants. In this review, our aim is to stimulate further research in different species and contexts
by providing conceptual and methodological guidelines for identifying teaching, with a focus on natural populations. We begin
by highlighting the fact that teaching is a form of cooperative behavior that functions to promote learning in others and
show that consideration of these key characteristics is critical in helping to identify suitable targets for future research.
We then go on to discuss potential observational, experimental, and statistical techniques that may assist researchers in
providing evidence that the criteria that make up the accepted operational definition of teaching have been met. Supplemental
materials for this article may be downloaded from http://lb.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. |
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