Doing the Right Thing: Infants' Selection of Actions to Imitate From Observed Event Sequences

Abstract

Two studies were conducted to investigate how 14-to 16-month-old infants select actions to imitate from the stream of events. In each study, an experimenter demonstrated two actions leading to an interesting effect. Aspects of the first action were manipulated and whether infants performed this action when given the objects was observed. In both studies, infants were more likely to imitate the first action when it was physically necessary to generate the effect, and in Study 2 they were also more likely to imitate the action when it was socially cued. It seems that infants' own knowledge of space and causality as well as their sensitivity to others' social signals both contribute to their tendency to imitate actions.

Putting the social into social learning: Explaining both selectivity and fidelity in children's copying behavior.

“…Further research has demonstrated that selectivity in imitation is not limited to cases in which children copy based on an understanding of the goals and intentions behind the demonstration. For example, children also copy selectively on the basis of the constraints on the model (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002), the age of the model (McGuigan, Makinson, & Whiten, in press;Seehagen & Herbert, 2011), and the causal relevance of the model's actions (Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme, & Bushnell, 2007).…”

Reasoning about ‘irrational’ actions: When intentional movements cannot be explained, the movements themselves are seen as the goal

“…ments in the literature, which employ a manipulation similar to the objects-present versus objects-absent manipulation of our first experiment. These studies show that children and even year-old infants engage in exact imitation more frequently when the movements are not an efficient means of achieving any plausible external goal (Bekkering, Wohlschlager, & Gattis, 2000;Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme, & Bushnell, 2007;Carpenter et al, 2005;Gattis, Bekkering, & Wohlschläger, 2002;Gleissner, Meltzoff, & Bekkering, 2000;Legare & Whitehouse, 2011;Williamson & Markman, 2006;Wohlschlager, Gattis, & Bekkering, 2003). For example, if a model reaches for and grasps one of her own ears, children imitate by grasping the ear on the same side, but often switch which arm is used (ipsilateral or contralateral), thus not imitating the exact movements.…”

“…In these and other examples (e.g. Brugger et al, 2007;Williamson & Markman, 2006), children imitate the exact movements more often when the movements are not the efficient means to a clear external goal, and imitate exactly less often when there is an external goal present which explains the movement.…”

Twenty-four-month-olds’ nonverbal memory for expected and unexpected versions of familiar events

“…A definitive version was subsequently published in Cognitive Development, 39, 168-180. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2016 20 from other studies show that the achievement of a preferred end-state may at times be more important for infants than re-enacting a specific action sequence verbatim (e.g., Brugger, Lariviere, Mumme, & Bushnell, 2007;Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). One way to examine whether the infants actually possess a representation of the unexpected version while producing the expected version would be to measure event-related potentials during the tests.…”