Appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mystery of overimitation has been a long-standing one in developmental psychology. How is it that young children, who are able to learn and reason in so many impressively agile ways, can be utterly stumped by something as simple as the transparent Puzzle Box shown above? Specifically, when kids see an adult getting a prize out of that box in a way that adults – and even chimpanzees – can easily identify as clumsy and inefficient, they seem to lose the ability to figure out how to open the box “correctly”. Watching an adult doing it wrong, in other words, effectively blocks children from figuring out how to do it right. Children become stuck overimitating – or copying the adult’s wasteful strategy, even when doing so leads to bad outcomes.

What does it all mean? The surprising truth of overimitation turns out to be very different from what psychologists and parents alike have long assumed, and now you can discover it for yourself. Created by developmental psychologist and study author Derek Lyons, this exciting new resource for parents and educators explains what overimitation means and why it matters for children’s cognitive development.