Perspectives on Learning Symbolic Data with Connectionistic Systems

For highly social organisms such as primates (including humans), cetaceans (whales and dolphins), and others, social learning, the ability to learn from others, is a powerful mechanism complementing and supporting individual learning. Also, in many species social learning and imitation provide the basis for culture, where behavior, ideas, or beliefs etc. are spreading within a population and passed down from generation to generation. One type of social learning has attracted particular attention among biologists and psychologists: imitation. For many years discussions on imitation in animals have focused on trying to define imitation, in particular trying to identify how it differs from other types of social learning. Some researchers, e.g. (Blackmore 1999), view imitation as a crucial mechanism for transmitting memes (the units of cultural evolution, analogous to the role genes play in biological evolution, Dawkins 1976). To what extent imitation is special to the human species is highly controversial (Blackmore 1999, Reader and Laland 1999); see also Sect. 1.2 below.