[Paleopsych] NYT: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.

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Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/13essa.html

    Essay
    By CARL ZIMMER

    I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question
    on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees?

    A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter
    Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale
    asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek
    Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was
    curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might
    shed light on human evolution.

    His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the
    journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two
    psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr.
    Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps
    how to retrieve food from a box.

    The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt
    running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the
    door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food,
    the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened
    the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box
    with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did
    they finally open the door and fish out the food.

    Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that
    the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were
    given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to
    retrieve the food.

    The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a
    strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the
    scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the
    top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

    The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box
    to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a
    sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it.
    They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.

    The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the
    room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought
    necessary to retrieve it.

    The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was
    pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80
    percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons
    said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."

    It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple
    desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this
    urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments
    with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew
    Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using
    Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned
    out a much larger study, with 100 children.

    I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the
    study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab.

    Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond
    saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking
    about atoms and princesses.

    Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over
    Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab,
    led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil.

    Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had
    just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped
    that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and
    effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.

    At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in
    which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent
    plastic box.

    He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic
    turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening
    the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it
    open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she
    shouted.

    A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.

    But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons
    had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open
    the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt
    back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly.
    Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had
    disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.

    Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time
    she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to
    say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.

    "She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100
    children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children
    really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get
    children not to.

    If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra
    steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even
    more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics
    well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box
    ripping is proof of that.

    Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired
    to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way
    to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change
    from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When
    they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on
    what its goals are and ignore its actions.

    As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out
    goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a
    way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they
    didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to
    imitate.

    Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a
    simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions
    of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more
    sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.

    We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation,
    because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it
    almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create
    very artificial circumstances to see it."

    In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I
    want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the
    chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.