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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?

The Puzzle Box

(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.

Click on an image to open the slideshow

Step OneStep TwoStep Three

Step FourStep Five

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 Don't Give a Hoot

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.
 

Chimps copy only the necessary actions, and ignore the rest

Step One (Ignored)Step Two (Ignored)Step Three (Ignored)

Step Four (Copied)Step Five (Copied)

 

...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.
 

Children copy all of the adult's actions - even the unnecessary ones that chimps know to ignore.

 

Step One (Copied)Step Two (Copied)Step Three (Copied)

Step Four (Copied)Step Five (Copied)

 

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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Thinking through some possible explanations for overimitation.

Comments (4)add
How much do chimps remember?
written by Janet , December 05, 2007
This is so fascinating. One thing I was wondering though is do the chimps remember everything that they saw the experimenter do? Maybe they don't do the extra things just because they don't remember them. I guess that wouldn't explain why children do copy the extra bits though. Better keep reading! smilies/wink.gif
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Re: How much do chimps remember?
written by Derek , December 05, 2007


Hi, Janet - welcome to Hello Felix!

The question you're asking is a really good one. So good in fact that the researchers who did the chimpanzee study ran a very clever additional experiment specifically to address it. Here's what they did. In addition to testing chimps with a transparent Puzzle Box like the one shown above, they also tested a different group of chimps with a puzzle box that was totally opaque. These chimps saw the experimenter go through exactly the same set of elaborate actions to get the prize out of the opaque box - the only difference was that since they couldn't see into the box, they couldn't tell for sure which of the actions were "silly" and which were actually important.

Interestingly, when these chimps were given the chance to get the prize out of the opaque box themselves, they showed a strong tendency to copy all of the adult's actions - even the unnecessary ones. As you point out, this is really important because it shows that the chimps in the first experiment (with the clear box) weren't avoiding the silly actions just because they couldn't remember them. They definitely remembered the unnecessary actions, just like the children and the chimps in the opaque box experiment. They didn't imitate them, though, because they could tell that they weren't important.

Pretty neat, eh? smilies/cheesy.gif

Thanks for commenting! Also, are you by any chance the same Janet who registered on the Felix Forum? If so, I hope you'll stop in soon to write some comments there, too!
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written by Heidi , May 13, 2008
The children would have skipped the unnecessary steps as well, if they believed the only goal was to get the food, as the chimps did. The children would copy the unnecessary tasks because they are expecting to be taught. They may not understand the full reason behind the movements, but they do them anyway, because they believe we are teaching them something. They assume that the extra movements are part of a larger plan of teaching. Chimps are not expecting to be taught. They teach by accident, where as humans teach intentionally.
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written by Steve Poole , May 18, 2008
I saw this demonstrated on a TV program yesterday with the initial opaque box stage included. The adult child relationship does seem an important factor. If you had a child "teaching" child scenario I think the overimitation might very quickly be omitted. It would be interesting to see how quickly it disappeared if a chain of kids were arranged. The first gets the ritual demonstrated by an adult the next receives the demonstration from that child and so on, but each interaction remains discrete from the previous one. I wonder how far down the chain that ritual would cease to be perpetuated. This does seem to have interesting implications for the relevance of much ritualized behavior in society. It would have been interesting to see the experiments taken further to explore that, for example comparing the longevity of the ritual down the chain with a silent performance of the demonstration to one where the motions are explained "First we do this as a sign of respect and then we open the door". I suspect such an exploration would not be popular viewing material.
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