ΜΑΘΗΣΗ ΜΕΣΩ ΜΙΜΗΣΗΣ: Παιδιά vs. Χιμπατζήδες [ΒΙΝΤΕΟ] 1

Ανακάλυψα αυτό τό πείραμα [δύο βίντεο στη συνέχεια] το οποίο με εντυπωσίασε.

Τα παιδιά ακόμα και όταν γνωρίζουν πως κάποιες ενέργειες είναι "άχρηστες" για την επίτευξη του σκοπού, μιμούνται 'πιστά' ολόκληρη τη διαδικασία, έτσι όπως τους την έχουν δείξει οι ενήλικες. Οι χιμπατζήδες, ωστόσο παραλείπουν τα "άχρηστα" βήματα και πηγαίνουν κατευθείαν στις ενέργειες που τους οδηγούν στην επίτευξη του σκοπού (λήψη τροφής).

Η διαφορά αυτή συζητείται ως κρίσιμη για τη γνωστική ανάπτυξη του είδους μας.

Μέρος 1:

Μέρος 2:

NOTE: This is a dramatic reenactment of an experiment for a TV documentary. The actual experiment criteria:
** The children used ranged from 3;4- 5 y.o.
** The chimps used ranged from 2-6 y.o. Chimps mature at 13-14 for females, 15-16 for males.

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>>> Δείτε και την σχετική ερευνητική αναφορά: Horner & Whiten, 2005

Πιθανές εξηγήσεις από Horner & Whiten, 2005:

[...] 'In contrast to the chimpanzees, children tended to recreate the actions they observed without appearing to consider the causal efficiency of their behaviour.Yet the literature, as noted earlier, suggests that children of this age have appropriate causal knowledge.Why then did the children, unlike the chimpanzees, not utilise this knowledge to develop the most efficient technique to retrieve the reward?

A first possibility is that children’s knowledge of causality is unavailable to other cognitive functions such as social learning. However, a number of studies have found that children could selectively ignore irrelevant actions in an observed sequence (Harnick 1978; Want and Harris 2001; Bauer and Kleinknecht 2002). Similarly, Bullock et al. (1982) found that 3- to 5-year-old children could correctly predictwhich physical changes to a piece of apparatuswere functionally relevant or irrelevant. It is therefore unlikely that the failure of children to differentiate between the irrelevant and relevant actions in the present study was the result of limitations in their causal knowledge.

A second possibility is that the children’s tendency to imitate was related to the difficulty of the task. It has been shown that irrelevant actions are more likely to be ignored as the difficulty of a task decreases (Harnick 1978; Bauer and Kleinknecht 2002). However, pilot work indicated that children continued to reproduce both irrelevant and relevant actionswhen the defences of the boxwere removed, thereby making the task simpler. Hence, we think it unlikely that children’s homogenous behaviour was a function of task difficulty.

Thirdly, the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may result from a differential focus of attention. Imitation may predominate in children because they attend more to the actions of others than the results of their behaviour (Bellagamba and Tomasello 1999; Bekkering et al. 2000). Call and Carpenter (2002) have suggested that in contrast, chimpanzees attend preferentially to goals and results, and this may account for the observed tendency of chimpanzees and children to use different social learning strategies.

Finally, it is possible that the divergent results for children and chimpanzees are due to differences in inferring “intention”. Although few studies have been carried out, there is conflicting evidence about whether chimpanzees are able to interpret actions in the framework of intentions (Call and Tomasello 1998b; Povinelli et al. 1998; Bering 2004; Tomasello and Call 2004). The developmental literature indicates that children can differentiate between intended and accidental actions, and can use this information to complete intended but failed demonstrations (Bellagamba and Tomasello 1999; Carpenter et al. 1998; Meltzoff 1995).

However, alternative explanations are possible (Charman and Huang 2002; Heyes and Ray 2002), and care must be taken since all intentions must be “inferred” (Zentall 2001), even in our own species (Horowitz 2003). Nevertheless, it remains a possibility that in the present study children, but not chimpanzees, reproduced the irrelevant actions of the demonstrator in all conditions because they were more inclined to view the actions of the demonstrator as intentional. Indeed, Gergely et al. (2002) have shown that children will imitate strange behaviours, such as using one’s head to work a switch, as long as they view the actions of the demonstrator as purposeful.

The children’s reproduction of irrelevant actions in this study contrastswith the findings of Want and Harris (2001), who found that 3-year-old children could benefit from, but selectively exclude, irrelevant actions from an observed sequence. However, in theWant and Harris study, the accidental irrelevant actions were followed by the demonstrator saying “Oops”. Subjects also received only one demonstration before they were given an opportunity to interact with the apparatus. Children may have reproduced the irrelevant actions in the present study because the demonstration was repeated three times before subjects could interact with the apparatus (increasing the probability that the actions were purposeful), and the demonstrator did not verbally identify the irrelevant actions as either accidental or undesirable.

Children may therefore have included all the observed actions because they saw the behaviour of the demonstrator as intentional, even if they did appreciate that some parts of the demonstration were causally irrelevant. We therefore believe that differences in the behaviour of chimpanzees and children can best be explained by a combination of a differential focus of attention on actions, results and goals, with the latter possibly influencing the interpretation of the actions of the demonstrator as purposeful.

Conclusions

The results of this series of experiments suggest that the availability of causal information can play an important

role in chimpanzee social learning, by determining which learning strategy is employed, and ultimately the degree of behavioural fidelity that is achieved.When causal informationwas available, young chimpanzees preferred to use emulation to solve a task. This may be adaptive because learning about the causal relationships involved in a task allows socially learned behaviours to be generalised to different conditions (Tomasello et al. 1987; Visalberghi 1994; Want andHarris 2001, 2002).However, if causal information was unavailable or difficult to infer, young chimpanzees were capable of switching to imitation to solve all, or part of the task. In contrast, in the context of this study, 3- to 4-yearold children did not seem to consider the causal relevance of their behaviour, and imitation was the preferred social learning strategy regardless of the availability of causal information. The prevalence of imitation in children may result from a predominant focus on the actions and/or intentions of the demonstrator. The results of this paper are in accord with other studies that have shown children to employ imitation in situationswhere alternative social learning strategiesmay bemore efficient (Nagell et al. 1993;Whiten et al. 1996). It has been suggested that imitation may be such an adaptive human strategy that it is often employed at the expense of efficiency (Whiten et al. 1996). It may also be that emulation is such an adaptive strategy in chimpanzees that it is often employed at the expense of copying fidelity.'


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