Study: Children learn and improve, chimps don't

William Atkins
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 17:52

Science - Biology

According to a study headed by British researchers, human children learn new and improved ways to do various activities, but chimps continue to use the first method they learned for doing something, unable, or unwilling, to learn better ways to do it.


The article “Emulation, imitation, over-imitation and the scope of culture for child and chimpanzee” appears in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0069 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 27 August 2009 vol. 364 no. 1528 2417-2428).

Its authors are Andrew Whiten (Department of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, University of St. Andrews, U.K.), Nicola McGuigan Heriot Watt University, U.K.), Sarah Marshall-Pescini (University of St. Andrews and University of Milan, Italy), and Lydia M. Hopper (University of St. Andrews and University of Durham, U.K.)

The researchers experimented with eleven young chimpanzees (chimps). They taught them to take honey out of a box by inserting a stick into a hole in the box.

This was considered the first way of doing a task.

Later, they then showed the chimps that they could insert the stick into the box's hole in order to release a latch, so the box opened up and they could get access to all of the honey, plus peanuts.

This was considered a new and improved way of performing a task.

However, the chimps continued to use the first (less effective) method even when the second (more effective) method was known to them.

Page two talks about the actions of young human children, along with the conclusions of the study.