About Francys Subiaul
My research seeks to understand human cultural uniqueness. Specifically, my colleagues and I have sought to address: What do we learn from others? And, How do we learn from others? These are questions that we often take for granted, as social learning comes so naturally to humans. Yet, most of what we know is derived from knowledge acquired from others among these are the basic skills of reading, writing and our ability to speak. In short, these skills and countless others make us who we are as individuals and as a species. Given that social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom, and traditions exist in great apes species, a fundamental question in the human sciences is what makes human social learning so seemingly different?
Over the past years, my colleagues and I have approached this problem by deconstructing imitation into component parts. First, we have sought to answer whether some types of arbitrary rules are easier to copy than others. For instance, are arbitrary spatial rules (up, down, right) easier to copy than ordinal rules (first, second, third)? Second, what is inherently easy/hard about copying certain types of information? And third, given this knowledge, when we present non-human primates with similar tasks, do we find any meaningful differences in imitation performance? On-going research with typically-developing children and children with autism, as well as with non-human great apes in the National Zoological Gardens hopes to ultimately answer whether between-species differences in what and how humans and other animals imitate explain human cultural uniqueness.
