QUESTION TEXT: While studying a large colony of macaque…
QUESTION TYPE: Most Strongly Supported
FACTS:
- Baby macaques imitated scientists smacking their lips, and sticking out their tongues.
- The baby macaques did not imitate the scientists when the scientists opened and closed their mouths, or when the scientists made hand gestures.
- Adult macaques smack lips and stick out tongues with babies. They do not open/close their mouths or make hand gestures with babies.
ANALYSIS: It sounds like the babies are only imitating those behaviors which an adult macaque would also do.
___________
- This isn’t supported: the babies didn’t mimic every behavior!
- Tempting, but this isn’t well supported. The babies also didn’t imitate mouth opening and closing, despite being able to mimic two other mouth related behaviors.
It’s likely a single explanation explain both cases of failure to mimic. - We don’t know why adult macaques use these behaviors with infants. We just know that they do use them.
- This is possible, but we have no evidence for it. It’s also possible that babies recognize the scientists aren’t macaques, but enjoy mimicking them anyway.
- CORRECT. This best fits the facts we have. It explains why the babies mimic the gestures used by adult macaques, but not other gestures.
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