Copying is a process which is very closely linked with intentions. There are too many details involved in an action for a person to be able to reproduce exactly what another does, so the best the copier can do is copy the important aspects of the action. As people and situations are all different, strict copying of an action would be useless; if one picked up a pencil by copying the muscle movements of another person, the chance of actually getting the pencil, due to differences in body structure and the relative location of the pencil, would be very small. Useful copying would require a child to duplicate the frame which the adult is using to recognize the action. A child would need to gain a large amount of experience in order to judge precisely which part of the action is important enough to belong in the frame, as the number of smaller actions which go into each part of an action is immense.
Chapter 24.9 describes recognizers and memorizers. In order to recognize a scene and reproduce it either by action or by drawing, a child needs to know enough not to merely attempt to reproduce what it sees, but to actually reproduce only the important parts of what it sees. A drawing of a car would include the glints of sun on the roof and the haze of the day and leaves blowing in front of it, but if the child does not represent the appropriate structural relationships, other people are not going to recognize the picture as a car. A simple method of dealing with this is for the child to draw the sun glints and leaves, and discover that they fail to represent a car. Through trial and error, the child will come up with a frame which represents the salient details involved in a car. Direct copying, on the other hand, would require some method of communicating the structure of a frame from one person to another. While language is quite useful in drawing up frames, frames must be created through experience. A child cannot know how to lift a heavy object without knowing something about gravity, and the easiest way to learn about gravity is through trial and error; one can talk about gravity all day, but it is not the same as feeling something heavy in one's hand.
As described in Chapter 13.06, younger children have a very difficult time drawing a pair of boxes, the uppermost of which is being shifted to the right. When the upper block begins to extend beyond the right side of the lower block, it begins to get shorter. This is because the child does not know which parts of the picture are important. It knows that the left side of the box needs to move, but is unsure about where the right side should end, so takes the convenient edge provided by the right edge of the lower box.
In a second situation, a child watches an adult pick up a ball. The child correctly figures out that it should not just repeat the movement the adult made, but should repeat only some of the aspects of it. If the child were to reach out its arm at the same angle the adult used, it would not encounter the ball, so the child reaches toward the ball, and wraps it's fingers about the ball as best as it can, perhaps using two hands for the task the adult was able to complete using only one, as its smaller, less dexterous hands may be less able to grasp the ball. On the other hand, when the child goes to throw the ball, it may mistake the proper procedure and imitate the wild arm movement of a professional pitcher, perhaps throwing the ball straight down at the ground. This is because the child lacks the experience to decide which part of the throwing is important to the process. The most efficient way for the child to gain the experience is through practice.