Dear MARMAM community,
On behalf of myself and my co authors I'm pleased to announce the following publication in *Animal Cognition: * Zamorano-Abramson, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M.V., Colmenares, F. *et al.* Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study. *Anim Cogn* (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-023-01756-3 Abstract: 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. Many thanks and best wishes, José Zamorano -Abramson Dr. José Zamorano-Abramson. 1.Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social, Facultad de Gobierno, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile. 2. Investigador Grupo de Psicobiología Social, Evolutiva y Comparada Departamento de Psicobiología y Metodología en Ciencias del Comportamiento.Facultad de Psicología. Universidad Complutense de Madrid.Campus de Somosaguas 28223 Madrid, Spain ORCID Id: <http://www.upla.cl/estudiosavanzados/es/investigadores/jose-francisco-zamorano-abramson/> orcid.org/0000-0001-7106-6419 RESEARCHE Id: B-3990-2012
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