How do children ape? Applying concepts from the study of non-human primates to the developmental study of 'imitation' in children

By Stephen C. Want, Paul L. Harris. 2002

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/481a6dce8c3848b9318a68e33fde42b9451879ec

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Developing new innovation models: Shifts in the innovation landscapes in emerging economies and implications for global R&D management (2009, background): “However, firms that chose emulation (which involves learning about the properties of or causal relations between objects; Want and Harris, 2002) during the initial stages were better able to develop flexible routines, enabling them to develop innovative offerings through systematic evolution.”
Knowledge management and innovation strategy: The challenge for latecomers in emerging economies (2008, background): “In developmental psychology, two means of social learning that humans adopt are classified as emulation, which “involves learning about the properties of, or causal relations between, objects (rather than just about their presence in the environment)” ( Want & Harris, 2002 : 3 ), andimitation, which”
Abstraction Levels for Robotic Imitation: Overview and Computational Approaches (2010, background): “Some works seek to clarify and distinguish several such approaches, either from a purely computational point-of-view [84,89,104,127] or taking inspiration in the biological counterparts [25, 79, 140, 143, 146, 148, 154].”
1 Imitation and Other Minds: The "Like Me" Hypothesis (2005, background): “Work by Want and Harris (2001, 2002) goes further and shows that 3- year-old children benefit from observing others using multiple means to achieve a goal.”
Social learning and social cognition: The case for pedagogy (2006, unknown): “When the actual goal of the behaviour is opaque, one can acquire the use of a tool by blind imitation (Want & Harris, 2002), hoping that he will learn later the useful function of the tool.”
A Computational Model of Social-Learning Mechanisms (2009, methodology): “Young children and apes are able to both imitate and emulate, but utilize the different strategies to different extents (Tennie, Call, & Tomasello, 2006; Want & Harris, 2002; Whiten et al., 2004).”
Towards a unified science of cultural evolution. (2006, background): “…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).”
Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens) (2005, methodology): “…referring to copying the results of actions (Tomasello 1990), it was later used to describe copying the affordances and causal relationships of a task (Tomasello 1996; Want and Harris 2001, 2002), as well as being sub-divided into several different categories (Byrne 1998; Custance et al. 1999).”
Push or Pull: Imitation vs. Emulation in Great Apes and Human Children (2006, result): “Nevertheless, our current results with 24-mo-old children question the idea that emulation tasks may be too complex for human infants (Want & Harris 2002; Byrne 2003).”
A Systematic Review of Action Imitation in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (2004, background): “Furthermore, the study of imitation itself has advanced, as a number of disciplines including primatology, robotics, neuropsychology, and developmental psychology have begun to cross-fertilise (Dautenhahn, 2002; Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002; Want & Harris, 2002).”