Children’s coding of human action: cognitive factors influencing imitaation in 3‐year‐old

Abstract

We used imitation as a tool for investigating how young children code action. The study was designed to examine the errors children make in re-enacting manual gestures they see. Thirty-two 3-year-old children served as subjects. Each child was shown 24 gestures, generated by systematically crossing four factors: visual monitoring, spatial endpoint, movement path, and number of hands. The results showed no difference as a function of whether the children could visually monitor their own responses. Interestingly, children made significantly more errors when the adult's action terminated on a body part than they did when the same movement terminated near the body part. There were also significantly more errors when the demonstrated act involved crossing midline than when it did not, and more errors when it involved one hand rather than two hands. Our hypothesis is that human acts are coded in terms of goals. The goals are hierarchically organized, and because young children have difficulty simultaneously integrating multiple goals into one act they often re-enact the goals that are ranked higher, which leads to the errors observed. We argue that imitation is an active reconstruction of perceived events and taps cognitive processing. We suggest that the goal-based imitation in 3-year-olds is a natural developmental outgrowth of the perceptual-motor mapping and goal-directed coding of human acts found in infancy.Imitation depends on the perception and coding of actions. In this paper we use imitation as a tool to investigate how young children code the actions they see others perform. We are as interested in the errors children make in attempting to re-enact actions as we are in their correct copying. Our starting assumption is that imitation is an active reconstruction of an observed event. We sought to uncover factors that facilitate and dampen imitative accuracy with an eye towards specifying the perceptual-motor and cognitive factors involved in imitation.Early work on the brain and cognitive mechanisms in imitation was conducted by Head (1920Head ( , 1926. He used adult patients with brain lesions (caused by gunshot wounds) and tested their ability to duplicate simple gestures such as touching the ear with the hand on the same side as or the opposite side of the body to the ear (ipsilateral and contralateral

The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent

“…Other work also highlights the role of goals in imitation (Bekkering, Wohlschläger, & Gattis, 2000;Csibra & Gergely, 2007;Elsner, 2007;Gattis, Bekkering, & Wolschläger, 2002;Gleissner, Meltzoff, & Bekkering, 2000;Meltzoff & Moore, 1997;Tomasello et al, 2005;Williamson & Markman, 2006;Wohlschläger, Gattis, & Bekkering, 2003). Our work helps address developmental origins.…”

Planning and Representing Intentional Action

“…Indeed, recent research reveals that infants and children imitate what they perceive as the action's actual goal but not how this goal is reached in the particular situation [146,147,148]. For instance, if kids had watched an adult pressing a switch with her nose they will also tend to use their own nose to press the switch [149].…”

Children’s understanding of directed motion events in an imitation choice task

“…There is some reason to believe that infants may extend their goal bias to these events: Carpenter et al (2005) used Directed Motion events and found that infants preferentially enacted the goal of the event. Their study is not wholly compelling, however, as ii This objection cannot be leveled at all previously used events in this domain, in particular, the mirror game , Gleissner et al 2000 does not involve any functional changes. However, children's error rates (that is, their incorrect imitation of the ipsi-or contra-lateral hand motions) are not that high in this game, topping out at around 25%.…”