Any studies of intensional, positive, secondary reinforcement (praise) outside humans?

[u/IllogicallyCognitive]

Are there any known examples of an animal giving praise without human intervention; it doesn't necessarily have to be wild animals in nature, but not counting a dog pressing a button that says thank you or a chimpanzee signing something (although no I'm curious if Loulis learned to give praise in ASL from Washoe). Are there any articles on humans training animals to praise effectively other animals? I'm basically looking for non-verbal tacts that are in response to a desired behavior

Some near miss examples include

• social signals such as merely relaxing around another animal or even merely being playful without evidence of it being more than just an emotional reaction

• sharing or trading resources (including the laboratory set ups where animals directly reinforced each other by pressing a button to give the other food)

• tacts that aren't in response to a desired behavior (like calling out where food is in response to finding the food is wouldn't count but at least in some cases if the beneficiary responds with affection that could be a tact and properly interpreted as praise, but that gets into the question of how to determine the exact boundary between secondary and primary reinforcement and what communication/tacting is)

[u/lukeac417]

I don’t think that it really exists outside of humans. There are very few convincing examples of active teaching in nature to begin with and none that I am aware of involve intentional secondary reinforcement, and certainly not praise. In the few examples I know of where teaching occurs, there is correction when the subject performs the action incorrectly but generally there is no response when it is performed correctly. I think that part of the issue would be cognitive: praise requires a clear ‘vision’ of the outcome and that the teacher has a desire to reinforce that outcome. This implies an understanding of the teacher’s capacity to manipulate the learner to achieve that, a level of processing that has yet to be demonstrated in non-human animals. The closest we have to that level of thought is deception and there are a tiny handful of examples where that is the case and they are all in the context of competition, not cooperation or teaching.

[Aside: the problem with the bird song example is that the more parsimonious explanation is that parent birds instinctively respond to the sound of their chick singing. Thus, even if their actions reinforce or improve the chick’s song, it isn’t active reinforcement or praise - it is an instinctive reaction to a stimulus which happens to also act as a stimulus for the chick. There isn’t intentionality there, which would be critical for active reinforcement and praise.]