In 1898, American psychologist Edward Thorndike published a seminal dissertation on animal intelligence. Thorndike, then at Columbia University, had spent hours experimenting with cats and special contraptions of his own design: puzzle boxes, confined spaces the cats could only escape by, for example, pawing at levers in order to trigger a release mechanism. Once out, the felines were greeted by some waiting food.
Thorndike found that his cats would quickly learn how to get out of the boxes. They easily figured out the different approaches necessary for success with different puzzles, and if a cat repeated the same trial again and again, it got quicker at solving it. Thorndike would plot the decrease in time taken to finish each puzzle on a graph—a pioneering approach at the time.
However, when Thorndike changed the puzzle experiments slightly, to see whether cats, dogs, and chicks were able to learn the correct actions simply by observing others performing them, the results were poor. Instead of picking up tips from escapees, animals seemed to have to learn the tactics again for themselves. Thorndike therefore dismissed the potential of non-primates to learn through social imitation.
Times have changed. Lately, biologists…
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