Beyond rational imitation: Learning arbitrary means actions from communicative demonstrations

Abstract

The principle of rationality has been invoked to explain that infants expect agents to perform the most efficient means action to attain a goal. It has also been demonstrated that infants take into account the efficiency of observed actions to achieve a goal outcome when deciding whether to reenact a specific behavior or not. It is puzzling, however, that they also tend to imitate an apparently suboptimal unfamiliar action even when they can bring about the same outcome more efficiently by applying a more rational action alternative available to them. We propose that this apparently paradoxical behavior is explained by infants' interpretation of action demonstrations as communicative manifestations of novel and culturally relevant means actions to be acquired, and we present empirical evidence supporting this proposal. In Experiment 1, we found that 14-month-olds reenacted novel arbitrary means actions only following a communicative demonstration. Experiment 2 showed that infants' inclination to reproduce communicatively manifested novel actions is restricted to behaviors they can construe as goal-directed instrumental acts. The study also provides evidence that infants' reenactment of the demonstrated novel actions reflects epistemic motives rather than purely social motives. We argue that ostensive communication enables infants to represent the teleological structure of novel actions even when the causal relations between means and end are cognitively opaque and apparently violate the efficiency expectation derived from the principle of rationality. This new account of imitative learning of novel means shows how the teleological stance and natural pedagogy--two separate cognitive adaptations to interpret instrumental versus communicative actions--are integrated as a system for learning socially constituted instrumental knowledge in humans.

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

“…Infants interpret inefficient actions differently when accompanied by pedagogical signals. Király et al (2013) built on a puzzling finding from an imitation task by Meltzoff (1988): after watching a model activate a light-box by touching it with his forehead, 14-month-olds were more likely to reproduce this action one week later than were control infants.…”

A Természetes pedagógiáról dióhéjban: A kulturális tudás hálójában

“…Mindezzel szemben a versengő elméletek azt állítják, hogy a babák utánzását elsősorban a cselekvés szaliens hatása váltja ki (Bekkering et al, 2000, illetve az utánzás a korábban emlékezetben kódolt akció és annak hatásának az asszociációjából fakadó motoros rezonancia eredménye (Paulus et al, 2011 in Király et al, 2013), vagy pedig a szaliens cselekvés figyelemre gyakorolt hatása moderálja az utánzást (Beisert, et al, 2012.…”

“…Azonban a kommunikációs helyzet utánzásra gyakorolt hatását mindaddig figyelmen kívül hagyták, mígnem Király, Csibra & Gergely (2013) rá nem mutatott ennek jelentőségére. A tizennégy hónapos babák 64%-a utánozta a modellt, amikor az kommunikációs kontextusban, fejével kapcsolta fel a lámpát, miközben kezei szabadok voltak.…”

“…(Király, Csibra & Gergely, 2013) Sőt mi több, a kísérlet egy további változatában az is bebizonyosodott, hogy a babák a modell távollétében, sőt, még egy héttel a demonstráció után is a fejükkel kapcsolták fel a lámpát, ha azt a modell osztenzív kommunikációja előzte meg.…”

Fourteen-Month-Olds Adapt Their Imitative Behavior in Light of a Model’s Constraints

“…Rather than imitating everything and everyone, however, infants tend to be selective in their imitative behavior, a tendency that is present from around 12 months of age [3,4]. Several factors influence infants' rates of imitation, some of which concern the action itself (for action component saliency see [5]), but also the context in which the action is presented (for pedagogical versus nonpedagogical context see [6]; for the role of emotional feedback on an action see [7]), as well as the model's previously displayed competence [8] and her group membership [9].…”