A
amorphia
Guest
Hi all,
I'm hoping someone here might be able to come up with a real life example from a traditional skill, to help me illustrate an interesting phenomenom about the way children learn new tasks by watching others. I'm interested in bushcrafty style skills because these are the skills that people have performed for hundreds of thousands of years, and so can have shaped the way we have evolved to think.
The phenomenon is called overimitation, and what it means is this: when young children watch an adult perform a task, and then try it themselves, they tend to faithfully copy all the details of the adult's actions, even if some of those actions were really blatantly not necessary to achieve the final goal. For example, when opening a box which is transparent so you can see the locking mechanism, children will copy odd things like tapping the box on the side, even though it doesn't seem to help open the box at all.
Some psychologists think that the children belief the odd action was necessary for opening the box, even if they can't see why. I'm interesting in an alternative explanation - the odd action might be useful for secondary reason, different to the main purpose.
Here are a couple of such examples (I think they are not such great examples and there ought to be much better ones - that's why I'm asking you!).
If you are picking mushrooms, your main goal is to get as many mushrooms as you can. So it's a little odd not to pick all the mushrooms. But you might do that because you have a secondary goal of leaving one to go to spore so there are some next season too.
If you are lighting a fire, probably the more tinder the easier it is, so it's odd not to use it all. But you might not use it all because you have a secondary aim of also being able to light a fire next time so you don't want to run out of tinder.
Both these examples focus on some kind of limited resource. It would be especially interesting to hear any example which don't feature that. Perhaps some kind of food processing example, where there is some useful byproduct, or something like that?
Thanks anyway for any ideas!
Cheers,
Ben
I'm hoping someone here might be able to come up with a real life example from a traditional skill, to help me illustrate an interesting phenomenom about the way children learn new tasks by watching others. I'm interested in bushcrafty style skills because these are the skills that people have performed for hundreds of thousands of years, and so can have shaped the way we have evolved to think.
The phenomenon is called overimitation, and what it means is this: when young children watch an adult perform a task, and then try it themselves, they tend to faithfully copy all the details of the adult's actions, even if some of those actions were really blatantly not necessary to achieve the final goal. For example, when opening a box which is transparent so you can see the locking mechanism, children will copy odd things like tapping the box on the side, even though it doesn't seem to help open the box at all.
Some psychologists think that the children belief the odd action was necessary for opening the box, even if they can't see why. I'm interesting in an alternative explanation - the odd action might be useful for secondary reason, different to the main purpose.
Here are a couple of such examples (I think they are not such great examples and there ought to be much better ones - that's why I'm asking you!).
If you are picking mushrooms, your main goal is to get as many mushrooms as you can. So it's a little odd not to pick all the mushrooms. But you might do that because you have a secondary goal of leaving one to go to spore so there are some next season too.
If you are lighting a fire, probably the more tinder the easier it is, so it's odd not to use it all. But you might not use it all because you have a secondary aim of also being able to light a fire next time so you don't want to run out of tinder.
Both these examples focus on some kind of limited resource. It would be especially interesting to hear any example which don't feature that. Perhaps some kind of food processing example, where there is some useful byproduct, or something like that?
Thanks anyway for any ideas!
Cheers,
Ben