Mike Tomasello is too tied up to do xmca as a regular thing, but
he wrote the following in response to Eva's note which I am
fowarding. I will forward selectively to him so long as the
discussion is on his topic as a way of enriching our discussion
and keeping him abreast of reactions to his ideas.
mike
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>From TOMAS who-is-at social-sci.ss.emory.edu Fri Aug 15 12:58:48 1997
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The main point about emulation versus imitation is this. Emulation is not
really social learning at all, except in a broad sense. If a chimp mother rolls
over a log and finds insects underneath, the child will likely follow suit.
Why? Because the child has learned something about the world - that the log
has insects under it. But she would have learned the same thing if the wind
had blown the log over. The child then goes on to use her already established
behavioral skills and strategies to do the rolling itself. Similarly, I think
chimps learn nut cracking because they find open nuts, unopen nuts, and
stones all in one place, and they see from others that nuts can be opened. They
are learning a new affordance of the object that they didn't previously know it
had. In imitative learning, on the other hand, an organism copies the actual
behavior or behavioral strategy of another organism. In our experimental
studies children do this with regularity, whereas chimps are much more
"creative". And indeed I do not want to say that imitative learning is "higher"
than emulation. Humans learn many things by emulation, and in some sense
it is more creative than imitative learning. But humans can learn via
imitation in addtion and this makes a huge difference on some small number
of occasions - one of the most important being the acquisition of
social-communicative behaviors such as language where emulation is not
really possible since there are no direct environmental effects to be observed.
Children can then go on to be creative with language after they have
imitatively learned the basic conventions. My view is that this small
difference of learning process is responsible for many of the differences we see
between chimp and human cultures.