دانلود رایگان مقاله فراگیری اجتماعی بزها از انسان ها در حل مسائل فضایی

Domestication drives changes in animal cognition and behaviour. In particular, the capacity of dogs to socially learn from humans is considered a key outcome of how domestication shaped the canid brain. However, systematic evidence for social learning from humans in other domestic species is lacking and makes general conclusions about how domestication has affected cognitive abilities difficult. We assessed spatial and social problem-solving abilities in goats, Capra hircus, using a detour task, in which food was placed behind an inward or outward V-shaped hurdle. Goats performed better in the outward than in the inward detour without human demonstration. Importantly, a single presentation by a human solving the inward detour resulted in goats solving the task faster compared to the inward detour without demonstration. Furthermore, eight of nine subjects that received a demonstration used the same route as the demonstrator in the subsequent trial. Thus, goats learn socially from humans. This provides strong evidence for social learning from humans in a domestic species other than dogs.

DISCUSSION

We investigated the ability of goats to socially learn from humans in a spatial problem-solving task. We found that goats that had seen a single demonstration of a human solving an inward detour task had significantly shorter latencies to detour around an obstacle than those that did not receive a demonstration. Although no difference between groups in the reverse trial could be found, goats that experienced an inward detour with a human demonstrator significantly decreased their latencies to detour an outward V-shaped obstacle. This was not the case for the group that received the inward detour without a demonstration. Contrary to some results for dogs (Pongracz et al., 2001
), eight of nine goats that received a human demonstration used the same route as the demonstrator in the subsequent trial. However, this was only the case for the first trial immediately after the human demonstration, but not for any subsequent trials. Surprisingly, and in contrast to other results on motor laterality in ungulates, individuals' choice of side to detour (left or right) showed no concordance over repeated trials (Leliveld, Langbein, & Puppe, 2013). We have shown that animals that have been primarily domesticated for food production are capable of perceiving information from humans, in a similar manner to companion animals such as dogs. Thus domestication might have a much broader impact on cognitive capacities than previously believed (Hare et al., 2005; Hare & Tomasello, 2005; Nawroth, Brett, & McElligott, 2016).