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  3. Whether they’re preschoolers from Australian suburbs or Kalahari Bushmen, children copy adults to a fault, according to a new st

Whether they’re preschoolers from Australian suburbs or Kalahari Bushmen, children copy adults to a fault, according to a new st

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问题     Whether they’re preschoolers from Australian suburbs or Kalahari Bushmen, children copy adults to a fault, according to a new study. The findings suggest that overimitation—in which a child copies everything an adult does, even irrelevant or silly actions—is a universal human trait that may contribute to our complex culture.
    Researchers already knew that overimitation was a human-specific quirk. In previous studies , dogs and chimps taught to open a box and retrieve a toy copied their teacher’s toy-seeking behavior only when it proved efficient.【R1】______
    "Animals focus on getting the job done," explains Mark Nielsen, a psychologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. "Humans seem to almost forget about the outcome and copy everything we see. "
    【R2】______Such parents tend to regularly teach and model behaviors for their children: for example, they frequently point out objects and explain what they are used for, or instruct their children step-by-step through a new activity, thus encouraging their children to view them as experts and overimitate them. So he turned to a culture with a distinctly different parenting style: the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.
    【R3】______
    To test his idea, Nielsen taught more than 90 children aged 2 to 13 in multiple Bushmen communities and in Brisbane to open a set of opaque boxes that each contained a hidden toy. Each box could be easily opened by lifting a knob, sliding a switch, or removing two nails that put a lid into place.
    【R4】______Then Nielsen or an instructing adult from the community showed the children how to open the box, incorporating an impractical action into the process: tracing circles over the box with a stick and using the stick to pull the knob, for example. To Nielsen’s surprise, all the kids overimitated equally.
    【R5】______
    However, cognitive scientist Laura Schulz, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sounds a note of caution. The study doesn’t explain why children overimitate, she says. It could be that humans tend to learn by imitating, or that they assume adults do things a certain way for a reason, such as politeness.
[A]"I think this is good that children around the world treat adults as rational and imitate them even if they don’t understand what the adult is doing—especially if they don’t know what the adult is doing. " He says.
[B]Nielsen held doubts, however, that the overly faithful copycatting was really universal to all humans, because all the experimental subjects were the middle- to upper-class kids of Western-educated parents.
[C]Sixty-two of the children were allowed to play with the boxes first, and 10 of these figured out how to open them on their own.
[D]The results support the idea that overimitation is a fundamentally human, cross-cultural phenomenon, one that may be critical to the transmission of human culture.
[E]When the instructing adult added irrelevant actions, such as brushing a feather along the edge of the box before opening it, the animal trainees skipped them, doing only what was necessary to get to the hidden toy. But human children copied every detail, even the pointless brush of the feather.
[F]For humans, "it is knowing the way things are done, not what gets done, that is important," Nielsen reported online on 16 April in Psychological Science. That focus on means over ends gives humans a leg up on learning the complicated behaviors that make up a culture, he adds.
[G]Whereas a Western parent might teach a youngster to use a bow and arrow by standing behind her and guiding her motions, a parent from the local African Bushmen culture would allow the child to come along for a hunt and learn by observation and through trial and error. Nielsen hypothesized that a child taught in this hands-off manner would have less reason to overimitate adults and would do so less often.
【R1】
选项
答案E
解析 本段前面提到，在以前的研究中，人们教狗和黑猩猩打开盒子找回玩具，而它们只模仿那些经过证明是有效的行为。而空格后面的一段是心理学家马克·尼尔森对动物这么做的解释，因此可以看出，空格处必须涉及有关动物对人类的模仿，而所有选项中只有选项[E]表达了这个意思，符合上下文语义逻辑，因此[E]为正确选项。
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