, 2009). Imitation has

mainly been studied within species, but chimpanzees and dogs, for example, appear to be successful at imitating human demonstrators (Huber et al., 2009; Whiten et al., 2009). In the ‘do as I do’ paradigm, animals are asked to imitate human movements. This ability appears cognitively demanding as the animal has to establish a correspondence between the visual human movement and its own motor response. However, it has been suggested that imitation can at least in part be based on associative learning processes, based on responses by mirror neurons (Iacoboni, 2009; de Waal & Ferrari, 2010). These neurons, described in primates and birds (Prather et al., 2008), not Trametinib datasheet only fire for a particular movement

performed by the animal (e.g. grasping an object) but also respond when observing another animal performing the same action (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Therefore, through experience, these neurons might establish a link between the observation of a movement and its own motor realization (Catmur, Walsh & Heyes, 2009). Domestication and selleck prolonged experience with humans might therefore facilitate the stimulation of mirror neurons in dogs when observing humans’ actions. Finally, many examples of copying, where an animal learns how to use a device by observation, are not cases of ‘true’ imitation as the exact same movements are not reproduced. Instead, these cases should be considered as emulation (Tomasello, 1996; Huber et al., 2009), whereby the tested animal simply learns which part of the device is associated with food by observation (associative learning)

but is not necessarily paying attention to the conspecific’s movements. The observation induces emulation towards the device, thus increasing the probability for the observer to find the appropriate action by a trial-and-error mechanism. Indeed, ‘ghost’ experiments, where the device is automatically opened in front of the tested animal, are often just as efficient in allowing successful subsequent manipulations (Huber et al., 2009). Despite the near-exclusive focus of the social learning literature on information learn more acquisition from conspecifics, we have seen that heterospecific information transfer is widespread and occurs in all the ecological and cognitive domains in which within-species social learning is also found. In ultimate terms, the fact that animals often use information from heterospecifics might be unsurprising. Information about water and food availability, food toxicity, predator threats, etc., will often be of relevance for more than one species, and animals would do well to use public information from members of other species. Indeed, Seppänen & Forsman (2007) and Goodale et al. (2010) made a convincing case that heterospecific social cues might sometimes be more useful than those provided by conspecifics.