are meerkats constructivists?

So yesterday I mentioned that a good 50% of the peer-reviewed articles on animal behavior I read open with some variant on the observation that we thought only people did this stuff.

I may have to revise that estimate upwards.

Last night I finally read "Teachers in the Wild" by Gergely Csibra (TRENDS in Cognitive Science, Vol. 11 No. 3).

Here's the abstract:

Three recent studies challenge the apparent consensus about the absence of teaching in non-human animals by providing evidence that certain behaviours of ants, birds and mammals satisfy a strict definition of teaching. However, these behaviours, although capable of facilitating information or skill acquisition in youngsters, could not support the transmission of cultural knowledge across individuals, which human teaching arguably serves.

translation: We thought only people had teachers; turns out South African pied babblers, ants, and meerkats do, too.

ergo: South African pied babbler, ant, and meerkat teaching isn't real teaching; South African pied babbler, ant, and meerkat teaching can't transmit cultural knowledge.

transmit!

teaching is transmitting!

According to Trends in Cognitive Science.



scorpian school for meerkats

Scorpian school (teachers are "mature members of the meerkat community") has three grades:^*

1st grade: the youngest meerkat pups are given dead scorpions to practice killing

2nd grade: older meerkat pups are given live but disabled scorpions (stinger has been removed) to practice killing

3rd grade: the oldest meerkat pups are given live, non-disabled scorpions (stinger intact) to practice killing

No word on what gift the pups get for graduation.



discovery isn't teaching

Human versus non-human teaching

These three studies describe phenomena that fulfill the accepted criteria for teaching [8], and there is no doubt that they serve the function of facilitating knowledge and skill acquisition of the young at the teachers’ expense. Still, they do not seem to be particularly good examples of the activity that, as humans, we would call ‘teaching’. What the ants and the babblers do could be considered as charitable information donation [13], whereas the meerkat helpers’ behaviour seems to be a good example of what is called ‘scaffolding’ (modifying the environment to support individual learning) in developmental psychology [14]. However, the prototypical human teaching is neither pure expression of episodic information nor just environmental scaffolding but a type of social learning that transmits generalizable (semantic) knowledge from the teacher to the pupil through (not necessarily linguistic) communication [15].

[snip]

Conversely, the opportunity teaching that has been demonstrated in meerkats does result in the acquisition of a generalizable skill: it not only provides youngsters with food but also ‘teaches’ them how to kill scorpions. However, the transmission of this skill is achieved by individual, not social, learning. If the helpers demonstrated (i.e. communicated in their behaviour) how to disable or kill scorpions, the pups could learn this skill from them, rather than through individual learning in the supportive environment that is provided by their teachers. Thus, none of these studies has shown us a behaviour that is equivalent to typical human teaching because they .... facilitate skill learning in a way that the information does not directly come from the source (as with meerkats). As such, these types of teaching are unable to support the transmission and maintenance of cultural forms with unrestricted content because the content of the transmitted information is .... left to be discovered by the pupil (as in opportunity teaching).

So there you have it:

1. scaffolding means arranging the environment so as to produce learning in a student

2. scaffolding forces the student to discover knowledge

3. forcing a student to discover knowledge is not true teaching

4. discovery teaching can't transmit and maintain "cultural forms"


fyi, number 4 is the goalpost moving passage, the point in the study where scientists struggle to explain why what animals (and insects!) are doing can't possibly be what we're doing.

I discount these statements. Where is the evidence that discovery teaching can't transmit and maintain "cultural forms"?

Still, I was amused to find TRENDS simply asserting that of course scaffolding, discovery, etc. aren't real human teaching. Scaffolding, discovery, etc. are the kind of thing a meerkat does, not a person.

A person does direct instruction.

I wonder if Dan Willingham has seen this article. He's the one who told to subscribe to TRENDS.


update from Lynn:

Catherine, is there any practical reason for being able to remove a stinger from a live scorpion other than as a teaching technique?

What kind of professional development is going on for the teacher meerkats?

I mean, how do they all know that in 2nd grade, this live scorpion/no stinger step is necessary? It's nonobvious as meerkats are not farmers, are they? So it seems that the real level of teaching going on is not between the adult and youngster, but between the teachers.

Good catch.

I'm not sure whether meerkats remove the stinger before killing a scorpion....but I assume from the article that they don't.

Interesting.

Also, see Mr. Person's comment.




FORAGER U. As it gets older, a young
meerkat begging for prey is more likely to
receive a live meal that it can practice subduing.
Image courtesy of Andrew Radford/Sophie Lanfear/
Alex Thornton/Katherine McAuliffe




NEWBIES. Pups about 30 days old are
just ready to go out foraging.
A. Radford, S. Lanfear, Thornton, McAuliffe

Live Prey for Dummies: Meerkats coach pups on hunting
by Susan Milius
Science News

................................

Radford, A.N. and Ridley, A.R. (2006) Recruitment calling: anovel form of extended parental care in an altricial species. Curr. Biol. 16, 1700–1704

Franks, N.R. and Richardson, T. (2006) Teaching in tandem-running ants. Nature 439, 153

Thornton, A. and McAuliffe, K. (2006) Teaching in wild meerkats. Science 313, 227–229

Pied babbler research project
Andrew Radford web page

yet another surprise from the animal world
are meerkats constructivists?

^* It's not this systematic: "For the youngest pups, 65 percent of those servings were alive, but for the oldest pups, almost 90 percent were still living."