primates vs humans

[laurenfuentes]

After re-reading the Carpenter and Horner articles, I felt compelled to extend my developmental argument outlined in my previous exploratory. The Horner study is extensive in its exploration of infantile knowledge of causality, almost complicating our previous ideas on the topic by introducing and comparing primate behavior. What I found most compelling about this study was what experiment four added to the conclusions drawn— that children reproduced irrelevant actions whereas the chimps would not with the clear boxes. I believe that this finding is indicative of what separates humans from primates on a very basic cognitive level. As cognitively less complex animals, primates are born with a brain structured a certain way. This structure I believe is what allows primates to engage in social learning very early in life and in a very short time, become independent of the primary caregiver. Chimps are endowed with a cognitive structure that is primed to internalize, understand and use “chimp things”. As research has shown, chimps primary means of social learning is in the form of emulation, where the chimp learns end goals without understanding the means. This is how their brain is structured.
Human infants on the other hand have a long time to learn what they need to survive— eighteen years approximately. We have evolved in such a way that our cognitive development needs to function such that we can develop the complex and high level thinking that we have as adults. In other words we need to develop in a different way to prepare our brains to function at a very high level. An indication of this different preparatory learning in humans is infant imitation. Through imitation we— as I discussed in my previous exploratory— understand others actions by understanding our own behavior. What imitation also provides us is exposure to an endless number of behaviors, end goals, intentions, emotions and feelings. We do not simply learn how to maneuver the world by having a collection of learned end goals, rather we accrue a deeper understanding of our own and other’s functioning and with this we are able to function in the world. When we look at human cognitive development this way, it makes sense that our society considers those under eighteen children. It takes years to create a deep enough understanding of human and own behavior to use this knowledge as a functional adult. This extensive period of time that the child is in the protective care of the mother (or family unit), as compared to other animals, is a testament to the time it takes to for such a complex brain to mature.
The Carpenter study seems to support my argument in my previous exploratory in a different way. In this study, infants were found to map on goals for experimenters’ actions and reflect these perceived goals in their imitative actions. What fits in so well with my argument is what the authors found in relation to the age differences. Looking at Table 1 (F18) we see that there is a considerable increase in only six months on the number of infants who produced each type of combination. Action + sound effect and sound effect + location emerged as the most commonly produced combination suggesting a developmental trend. It seems that even children one year old have basic abilities to interpret and reproduce actions, which increase dramatically through experience.