At 06:34 PM 8/15/97 +0200, you wrote:
>For example, I'm in the middle of the "phylogenetic" chapter, trying to
>think straight about Mike Tomasello's distinction between 'imitation' and
>'emulation'. For those of you who haven't been there recently, Tomasello
>et al. basically argue that chimps (et al.) learn by _emulating_ the
>behavior of others, i.e. they observe some new means used towards a
>desirable end, and then pick up similar means working their own way towards
>accomplishing the task. _Imitation_ in Tomasello's version consists in
>observing and copying the _methods_ of the more skilled individual as well
>as the means.
>
>Somehow this move of introducing a distinction (between two senses of
>'imitation') disturbs me. Perhaps it's simply that, naturally, people, too,
>do a lot of learning by emulation: it's a kind of creative and
>non-authoritarian way of learning... I don't like to get it portrayed as
>inferior! It also disturbs me that it re-constitutes a single-quality gap
>between us humans and all the rest.
>
I'm not an expert in the area but I thought that work by Primak (sp?) and
his colleagues as well as by De Waal provide some evidence for
observational learning in apes (i.e., learning by "imitation"). I think
that the main difference between Tomasello's and Primak-De Waal's results
may come from the fact that Tomasello mainly employs control experiment
methodology while Primak and De Waal use naturalistic observations. It
might be that Tomasello could not design the ecologically valid (for the
apes) circumstances for observational learning. From my personal experience
(although I'm not fully an ape :-), I know that my observational learning
is not unconditional. There are many circumstances, in which I prefer to
solve a problem myself rather than "imitate" or even observe somebody
else's solution. What do you think?
I wonder if somebody more knowledgeable in the area of ape's learning
(espeacially in naturalistic circumstances) can inform us on the issue.
Eugene Matusov
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Eugene Matusov
Department of Educational Studies
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19711
http://www.ematusov.com