Comments on: Humans imitate humans more than chimps do

By: ch

ch — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 19:23:07 +0000

Here’s one alternative explanation: visible food inside a clear box is too salient for a chimp to disengage its attention from the food and concentrate instead on the actions performed on the box. Children, on the other hand, do not have such a strong stimulus-response relationship with food and are more likely to be able to flexibly engage their attention, and therefore successfully imitate, in the presence of salient and distracting stimuli (such as food).

By: Bayle

Bayle — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 07:10:25 +0000

While the cool conclusion that one would like to draw from this study is that imitation is a very useful cognitive strategy for children that probably helps out with uniquely human strengths such as language learning, there are other possible explanations. For instance, maybe human children are just stupider in some way because they are children (even though they can figure out how to open the box when they are on their own, the parts of their mind may not be sufficiently integerated to allow them to apply that capability in this situation). Or, perhaps chimps would have imitated too if they had seen a member of their own species open the box with the unnecessary actions.

By: Bayle

Bayle — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 06:57:27 +0000

I’m worried that I may be a clandestine subject of this experiment. Something about it reminds me of the transmission of techniques for culturing neurons :).