Take a four-year-old child and an adult chimpanzee and have them observe an experimenter open a puzzle box to get food, in the process performing several irrelevant actions. Both chimps and human children learn to open the puzzle box through observation; however, chimps will skip the irrelevant steps, but human children will perform all the steps they observed, including the irrelevant ones. Human children are over-imitators. This over-imitation is, in fact, quite clever. Children change their degree of copying based on how much they believe the teacher knows—“This person clearly knows what
...more
