Imitation is Flattery; Social Learning is Fitness
While reading the article "But What About the Gigantic Elephant in the Room" the quote "People cannot be much influenced by observed events if they do not remember them" (Bandura, 2011, p. 1) had me scratching my head. From what we have learned and know of implicit learning, implicit biases, and memory is it true that we are not influenced by what we do not remember? I think one example of observed events influencing our behavior without us being consciously aware of it is in the media. The media portrays many stereotypes; many of which go unnoticed by most individuals. Despite our unawareness of these stereotypes they are still floating around in our brains affecting the schemas we create and the behaviors we display.
I was also drawn to Bandura's (2011) discussion of the misconception that modeling can only produce imitation or response mimicry. As a social animal and owner of three social animals I know that there is more to modeling than just imitation. I have often found it interesting to observe these social animals learn the "guiding principle" of a behavior and then "generate new version of the behavior that go beyond what they have seen and heard" (Bandura, 2011, p. 2). Everytime my husband and I make the trip back to Wisconsin and our dog gets to observe my parents' two dogs' behavior I notice new behaviors that she brings back with her to Kentucky. For example, after the first time we came home our pup had picked up the behavior of barking at intruders. However, she generated a more urban version of this and barked at dogs who were far away at the dog park. My own memories and experiences of my pets learning behaviors from each other inspired me to do a general Google search to see what other examples of modeling occurred and in particular with dogs. From this I ran across these two rather recent articles. Interestingly, many of the articles I read described dogs imitating human behavior; usually animals model behavior after animals of the same species.
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/07/your-dog-is-a-copycat.html
http://news.discovery.com/animals/pets-dogs-imitate-people.htm
As is to be expected both articles discuss dogs' behavior as being imitation. Perhaps as Bandura states the dog imitate the human behavior and then later incorporate it into their own behaviors.
Here's a comment I put on Mary Ann's blog. She raised a question similar to yours on implicit learning: Yes, implicit learning still involves memory. The memory too is implicit. Most of what we remember I would say is of this nature.
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