How do children ape? Applying concepts from the study of non‐human primates to the developmental study of ‘imitation’ in children

Abstract

We highlight two aspects of research into social learning that have been neglected in existing developmental research, namely:(1) The role of social learning in learning to use tools, and (2) Whether children's social learning involves copying the actions themselves ('blind' imitation or mimicry), or alternatively, the effects of those actions (emulation). In Part I of the paper we argue that the failure to distinguish between these different mechanisms is closely related to the lack of research on the social transmission of tool use and that both omissions limit our understanding of early social learning. We conclude Part I by outlining the requirements for an adequate study of these two issues. In Part II, we use this analysis to critically examine data from existing developmental research with children. We also assess the data currently available in the comparative literature which address these issues more directly. We conclude that children learn only what actions to perform via observation ('blind' imitation or mimicry), and not why those actions are effective (emulation). We close by identifying important potential pitfalls and unresolved questions for the future study of the social learning of actions on objects.

The multiple roles of cultural transmission experiments in understanding human cultural evolution

“…However, apart from Schotter & Sopher's (2003) study (which did not allow cumulative improvement), there has been no formal experimental comparison of different cultural transmission mechanisms, such as imitation, emulation and stimulus enhancement ). Although such work has only just begun in the nonhuman animal literature (Hopper et al 2007;Whiten in press), future studies using human adults could similarly profit from the detailed taxonomies of social learning and methods of the non-human social learning research (Want & Harris 2002;Whiten et al 2004) in order to identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying particular forms of cultural transmission.…”

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

“…Third, if neuronal studies have been largely restricted to monkeys and whole-brain studies to adult humans, it is research at the cognitive level regarding social learning in great apes and, more recently, human children that has generated the richest current taxonomies of cultural learning, delineating such processes as program-level imitation, emulation, and affordance learning (Byrne & Russon 1998;Tomasello et al 1993;Want & Harris 2002;Whiten & Ham 1992;Whiten et al 2004). Cognitive models that seek to explain how these operate have begun to proliferate but remain few and quite crude in comparison to our understanding of genetic transmission mechanisms; they include Meltzoff and Moore's (1997) active intermodal matching (AIM), Heyes's (2005) associative sequence learning (ASL), and Byrne's (1999) string parsing models.…”

Kinematic Measures of Imitation Fidelity in Primary School Children

“…Research in children has since continued to study imitation as an essential aspect of cognitive development that develops in the first years of life, in neonates (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977) and with the development of deferred imitation that occurs in the first year (Meltzoff, 1988). More recently, researchers have begun to explore the utility of cognitive mechanisms in imitation such as causal understanding, hierarchical thinking and secondary representation (Flynn & Whiten, 2008;Horner & Whiten, 2005;Nielson., Dissanayake, 2004;Want & Harris, 2001;Want & Harris, 2002;Whiten, Flynn, Brown, & Lee, 2006). Selectivity of imitation has also become a topic of interest as some children imitate actions that are unnecessary to achieve a goal.…”