The Social Behavior of Older Animals

5 Teaching and Learning

chapter 5 Teaching and Learning Teaching A re nonhuman animals teachers? Is it possible to pinpoint activity that can be labeled “teaching” per se? In their book How Monkeys See the World (1990), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth argued that monkeys (who are presumably smarter than most mammals) could acquire novel skills from others through observation, social enhancement, and trial-and-error learning, but doubted that they were able to imitate the behavior of others, and claimed that they were unable to teach. More recently, Bennett Galef and his colleagues (2005) invented a method that shows that a mother rat (Rattus norvegicus) does not teach her young what to eat. Other researchers, however, think that teaching does occur in nonhuman animals, although little is documented on the subject. This chapter considers teaching in general, followed by a discussion of the few incidents I have come across (during years of searching for examples) of possible instruction and learning by older animals. What is teaching? For humans, it is generally assumed to occur when a more knowledgeable person intentionally conveys information to a lessinformed one (usually a child or youth). Higher nonhuman animals (usually mothers) seem to teach their young, too—for example, how to find food and how to beware of predators or, depending on the species, how to be a predator. However, for nonhuman animals, it is impossible to prove intentionality. Timothy Caro and Marc Hauser (1992) therefore defined the process of teaching in nonhuman animals as follows: An individual actor A can be said to teach if it modifies its behavior only in the presence of a naive observer, B, at some cost or at least without obtaining an immediate benefit for itself. A’s behavior thereby encourages or punishes B’s behavior, or provides B with experience, or sets an example for B. As a result, B acquires knowledge or learns 50 a skill earlier in life or more rapidly or efficiently than it might otherwise do, or that it would not learn at all. This definition usually means that older animals will be focusing on younger ones, and that the former must not benefit from the instruction. (An elder would benefit, for example, if he or she defeated inferiors in battle, thus teaching them to avoid this oldster in the future.) The researchers noted that an instructor need not be sensitive to a pupil’s changing skills, or be able to attribute mental states to others, as these “are not necessary conditions of teaching in nonhuman animals, as assumed by previous work, because guided instruction without these prerequisites could still be favored by natural selection.” Caro and Hauser lumped various case studies under two categories: (1) opportunity teaching, such as predator parents toying with prey so their young can practice killing, and (2) coaching, where a youngster is either encouraged or punished by an adult for his or her behavior. They note four common mechanisms of instruction that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and that can be applied to examples of what seem to be teaching by older animals: 1. social learning, such as by imitation or by social facilitation, 2. giving an individual more opportunities to learn, 3. encouraging, and 4. punishing. imitation An early example of what might be called “teaching by imitation” occurred in Japanese monkeys, even though it was young animals who first began the sweet-potato-washing and wheat-washing behaviors that then spread throughout much of the community. One day a young female dipped her sandy sweet potato in water, thereby washing the sand off before eating it (Kawai 1965). “Her mother and closest peers soon followed , and the habit spread to others. Within a decade, the whole of the population under middle age was washing potatoes” (de Waal 1999). The same type of scenario—involving what seems like imitation—has been analyzed by Marc Hauser (1988) for vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus Teaching and Learning 51 aethiops), which he studied for many years in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. (He wonders if we are dealing with social learning, social interaction , exhibition, or contagious behavior.) In this case, the year was 1983, and the “teacher” was not a juvenile, but 14-year-old Borgia during her last years (she died in 1987). She was by far the oldest in the group of three adult males, four adult females, and three juveniles who made up...