When is a Chimp Smarter Than a Child?
Imagine that you’re four years old, and you’ve just found out that the simple Puzzle Box shown below contains – get ready – a toy turtle. Now that’s cause for some serious excitement. There’s just one question: how are you going to get it out?
Where's the Turtle?
(Click image for larger view.)
Fortunately this particular Puzzle Box is about as simple as puzzles come. It’s so transparent in fact – both literally and figuratively – that even chimpanzees can figure it out. When researchers gave chimpanzees an analogous box, they found that the chimps knew at a glance that the hidden prize had to be in the blue tube behind the red door, the only part of the box that isn’t visibly empty.
For our imagined four-year-old, though, there’s a bit of a catch. Before he can get the turtle out for himself, he’s going to see an adult doing it. There’s nothing too unusual about this of course; children frequently observe adult’s performing simple tasks before having an opportunity to do them themselves. In this particular case though, the specific way in which the adult goes about retrieving the turtle isn’t quite what one might expect.
Rather than just doing what seems most obvious and opening the red door, the adult goes through a more elaborate series of steps, shown here.
Using a small Velcro wand, the adult first taps carefully on the end of the red wooden "bolt" on top of the box and then pushes the bolt out of its bracket (step 2). Then he uses the wand to tap three times on the floor of the empty top compartment (step 3). Only then – finally – does he turn his attention to the red door, pulling it off to reveal the much-anticipated turtle (steps 4 and 5).
So what will the child do? How will the child go about retrieving the turtle for himself? Since the Puzzle Box is so simple, and the child is so motivated to get his hands on that exciting turtle, it seems likely that he will pretty much ignore all of the adult’s strange actions. Why waste your time tapping on the box and carefully pulling out wooden bolts that aren’t connected to anything when you can just whip off the door and get the turtle? Instant gratification beats a delayed reward anytime.
They Don't Give a Hoot About Unnecessary Actions
Chimps Open the Puzzle Box Quickly and Efficiently...Chimpanzees, it turns out, strongly agree with this sentiment.
When two comparative psychologists from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, Dr. Victoria Horner and Professor Andrew Whiten, did this very experiment with chimps, they found that our non-human primate friends didn’t give a hoot about all the unnecessary actions they saw the adult go through while getting the prize out. They ignored all of the irrelevant actions that the adult performed, and instead copied only what was truly necessary to get the prize out for themselves.
This means that the chimps were very clever and selective - they only copied the few things that they actually needed to do to get the prize out, and dismissed the rest as unimportant.
...But Kids Seem More Confused.
Now here’s the puzzle. Unlike the chimps, children in this situation don’t ignore the adult’s unnecessary actions. Rather than just going straight for the turtle, the vast majority of children expend the time and effort to imitate everything that they saw the adult do – even the things that were an unnecessary waste of time. They imitate the tapping on the box. They imitate the removal of the red bolt. They even imitate using the wand to tap in the empty top compartment! They imitate every last one of the irrelevant things that chimps were too sensible to waste their time with.
That's what overimitation is - it’s children’s curious tendency to copy adults’ unnecessary actions, even in situations where chimpanzees are clever enough to ignore them. The real question, the one that my research at Yale has focused on, is what does overimitation mean? Is overimitation a scientifically interesting occurrence – one that tells us something unexpected about the way children learn from the actions of others? Or is it just an example of kids being kids, copying adults’ actions just because its fun to do so?
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