ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical reappraisal of the dominant role classically attributed to imitation in cultural reproduction. It argues that the properties of alternative social learning mechanisms reflect the specific demand characteristics that different kinds of cultural products impose on their cultural transmission process to ensure their reproducibility. The chapter distinguishes between cultural forms whose functionally relevant aspects are cognitively “transparent” versus “opaque” for the observational learner and discusses the inherent relation between these properties on the one hand, and emulation versus imitation on the other hand. It also argues how the emergence of different cultural environments with predominantly cognitively transparent versus opaque cultural forms may have led to the selection and specialization of suitable alternative social transmission mechanisms. Tomasello proposed that emulation learning takes place when “by observing the manipulations of other animals individuals may learn all kinds of ‘affordances’ of the environment that they would be unlikely to discover on their own”.
