Learning And Solving The Animal Kingdom - 1341 Words

Teddy Miqui Psych 243 Learning and Problem Solving in the Animal Kingdom In the animal kingdom certain groups of animals have an ability to learn and use their environment around them to overcome certain obstacles. It is very rare to find animals that have the cognitive ability to solve these types of problems. However, certain animals have the ability to use tools to solve certain issues with their environment. While other animals have the ability to solve complex puzzles to get themselves out of unknown situations. When an animal has the ability to understand their surroundings and use their intellect to solve certain issues they are considered quite intelligent, but as of now there are only a certain select group of animals that have†¦show more content†¦Whenever one animal teacher another they are using a learning method called social learning. This technique is not unique to animal kingdom, even in our society we have people teaching other skills or piece of information that we deem useful for our purposes. However animals find certain thin gs more than humans such as the ability to acquire food and water. In groups of Meer cats it was found that certain individuals were designated to teach the younger individuals how to property hunt scorpions without being stung. This is a direct example of social learning within the animal kingdom, in this study it was found that those individuals taught how to hunt were more likely to capture the scorpions without actually being stung compared to those who were just given the food from a young age (Thornton,, 2008). Social learning can also be seen in more advance species such as primates. As seen in Catherine Hobaiter article there many forms of social learning that can occur in species such as chimpanzees. It was found that within a group of chimps younger individuals learned how to use moss sponging from older individual within their tribe (Hobaiter, 2014). This allowed them to absorb water and drink the contents from the sponge. This technique was useful for the chimps to learn because this allowed them to gather and drink water reliably in the wild. This example also shows us how