Social learning is a powerful mechanism of information acquisition and can be found in various species. According to the type of information transmitted, animals may change their motivation to perform actions, shift their perception/attention to relevant stimuli, associate other individuals' behaviours with particular stimuli/events or learn to perform ‘novel’ behaviours. The latter is referred to as imitation and has been considered a cognitively demanding mechanism necessary for high-fidelity copying, which may or may not occur in nonhuman animals. We tested the ability of 20 juvenile ravens to imitate an action demonstrated by a human experimenter. Birds of two test groups could observe a familiar human executing one of two opening techniques at an artificial fruit apparatus (horizontal or vertical hand movements directed towards the same location), whereas birds of a control group observed the human touching but not opening the apparatus. Ravens of both test groups tended to use the same direction of movements as observed, when they opened the apparatus themselves with their beak. Comparison with the control group revealed that ravens had a predisposition to manipulate the apparatus by pecking. Hence, observers of vertical hand movements most likely strengthened their initial preference for executing peck movements towards an item enclosing food, whereas observers of horizontal hand movements started to apply beak/head movements that hardly occur during foraging and are ‘novel’ to this context. Juvenile ravens are thus capable of imitating simple motor actions, even though they may use a different body part to execute the behaviours than human demonstrators.

中文翻译：

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幼年乌鸦的情景模仿，Corvus corax

社会学习是一种强大的信息获取机制，可以在各种物种中找到。根据传递的信息类型，动物可能会改变他们执行动作的动机，将他们的感知/注意力转移到相关刺激上，将其他人的行为与特定的刺激/事件联系起来，或者学习执行“新奇”的行为。后者被称为模仿，并被认为是高保真复制所必需的认知要求机制，这可能会或可能不会发生在非人类动物身上。我们测试了 20 只幼年乌鸦模仿人类实验者演示的动作的能力。两个测试组的鸟类可以观察到熟悉的人类在人造水果装置上执行两种打开技术中的一种（水平或垂直的手部动作指向同一位置），而对照组的鸟类观察到人类触摸但没有打开装置。两个测试组的乌鸦都倾向于使用与观察到的相同的运动方向，当它们自己用喙打开装置时。与对照组的比较表明，乌鸦有通过啄食来操纵装置的倾向。因此，垂直手部运动的观察者很可能会加强他们最初对包裹食物的物品执行啄食运动的偏好，而水平手部运动的观察者开始应用在觅食过程中几乎不会发生的喙/头部运动，并且在这种情况下是“新颖的”。因此，幼年乌鸦能够模仿简单的运动动作，即使它们可能使用与人类示范者不同的身体部位来执行这些行为。