Imitation in young children: When who gets copied is more important than what gets copied.

Abstract

Unlike other animals, human children will copy all of an adult's goal-directed actions, including ones that are clearly unnecessary for achieving the demonstrated goal. Here we highlight how social affiliation is key to this species-specific behavior. Preschoolers watched 2 adults retrieve a toy from a novel apparatus. One adult included irrelevant actions in her demonstration; the other only used actions causally related to opening the apparatus. After both adults took turns demonstrating, 1 left the test room, and the remaining adult gave the apparatus to the child. Children reproduced the irrelevant actions only when given the apparatus by the adult who had demonstrated them, even though the departed adult's actions emphasized how unnecessary these redundant actions were. Our results highlight the specialized skills for participating in cultural groups that have evolved in humans and provide insight into why finding such high fidelity copying in other animals has proven elusive.

Kinematic Measures of Imitation Fidelity in Primary School Children

“…Consequently, it is necessary to be interpret these findings in a context of the goaldirected imitation literature with some caution. In detecting a contraction bias, we find that children are imitating conservatively, which appears at some odds with literature suggesting that children are more likely to over-imitate (Horner & Whiten, 2005;McGuigan et al, 2010) and that they may do so to comply with prescriptive norms or cultural expectations (Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011;Nielsen & Blank, 2011). In our study however, the degree of error was not the result of intentional action selection but rather a mismatch between magnitudes of perceived and executed actions, presumably as a result of the functioning of the visuomotor system.…”

Limitations to the cultural ratchet effect in young children

“…Furthermore, since faithful imitation is often related to the social context at the time of the demonstration and response (e.g., Nielsen & Blank, 2011;Nielsen, Simcock, & Jenkins, 2008;Over & Carpenter, 2009; see also work on conformity and audience effects, e.g., Haun & Tomasello, 2011), manipulating, for example, who is watching when could also be informative. It might also be interesting to manipulate the type of tool used in the demonstration.…”

The role of parietal cortex in overimitation: a study with fNIRS

“…Social cues, such as demonstrator status, have been shown to modulate overimitation. For example, it has been shown that children will only reproduce irrational actions when being observed by the demonstrator (Lyons et al, 2007;Nielsen & Blank, 2011). This suggests that overimitation is an important social behavior, and motivates us to explore its neural mechanisms.…”

“…Implicit mimicry is always likely to be more subtle than explicit copying. Second, overimitation is very much a social behavior, which occurs most commonly in social context such as being watched by an experimenter (Nielsen & Blank, 2011). To maintain tight experimental control, the social context of the current study was minimal.…”