At first, she did. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box.
He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle.
"I've got it!" she shouted.
A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought.
But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting.
Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say.
"So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly.
"She's pretty age-typical," Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Horner and Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to.
If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that.
Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.
As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing.
"Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Lyons said.
We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well.
"It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it."
In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's OK to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human.
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