In a New York Times article, Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t, Carl Zimmer describes his daughter’s participation in some research about problem solving and imitation in chimpanzees and human children.

If chimpanzees watch someone open a box with a routine that includes several unnecessary steps, they just ignore those steps and open the box the obvious way. Human children imitate: They leave in the unnecessary steps even though they can easily see how to open the box the straightforward way.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best strategy. 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.

Let’s speculate: Usually, imitation and problem solving aren’t at odds: A child models an experienced adult who shows the proper way to do something. (You’ll find a discussion of the critical role of modeling in Grow With the Flow, on pages 158-160. That portion isn’t online yet.) Sometimes the task is one where the child would eventually develop the same strategy by problem solving. Sometimes the task is so complex that generations of problem solving have been involved, and the demonstration summarizes what has been learned. In that case, the reason for all the steps is unlikely to be either obvious or intuitive, so strict imitation is adaptive. As the skills involved in acculturation become more and more complex, modeling may more and more often avoid errors likely to develop from strictly individual problem solving.

We know that other primates imitate. We know they can be inspired problem solvers. We know that humans have pushed both of those cognitive abilities considerably forward. From this recent research, it appears that in human children at least, the default is to imitate when imitation and direct problem solving are in conflict, and that this is likely to lead to efficient learning and knowledge transmission.

Language adds another layer to the process. Our kids often simply watch us do something and imitate. Often we don’t notice they’re doing this – we’re getting the job done, they’re watching how we do it. But when we’re in our teaching mode, adults naturally combine language with demonstration, which is usually very efficient. There are times when modeling is primary: “Hold it this way.” There are times when language does what modeling can’t: “We hold it this way because…” But usually the process is a smoothly integrated one, with language and demonstration, modeling and questioning combining to give efficient learning.

Speculating on apace: Children’s frontal lobes, primary home to our executive functioning, aren’t fully developed until the late teens or early twenties. That is to say, the research described here involves kids who don’t yet have fully developed reasoning ability combined with an ability to direct that ability towards complex goals.

The middle years – when language is well developed, but the frontal lobes aren’t – is one of the great periods of knowledge acquisition. Brains in this era seem more like sponges than at any other point in our life span. During these years, we seem especially attuned to knowledge acquisition – both declarative knowledge (like the names of dinosaurs) and procedural ("how to") knowledge. That’s important, since these are the years when children develop much of the knowledge that they will need to function in their culture. It seems intuitively reasonable that imitation – modeling – would be a preferred mode in these years. It isn’t yet time to challenge, so much as to understand what and how.

Imagine yourself doing this same experiment: demonstrating how to open a box, where the person watching could easily figure out the simplest way to do the task, but where you add in unnecessary extra steps. We know from this recent research that a child would imitate with the extra steps. I can guess how a teenager would be likely to respond. ("That’s stupid.") But what about an adult? My guess: the adult would either use language ("Why did you add the extra steps?” or “Should I imitate your procedure?") or else open the box the sensible way. That would represent another level of human cognitive complexity. But that, in turn, makes me wonder: What would young chimps do? Wouldn’t it be a kick if durng their younger (acculturation) phases, chimpanzees imitated like human kids?

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It seems to be Primate Research Speculation Week around here. I just posted a comment about girl bullies, amusing myself by wondering if they represent a remnant of primate dominance behavior, and whether that will still prove to be adaptive, or whether it may obtain short-term goals like status in junior high school at the expense of long-term goals like satisfying careers.