What drives young children to over-imitate? Investigating the effects of age, context, action type, and transitivity

Abstract

Imitation underlies many traits thought to characterize our species, which includes the transmission and acquisition of language, material culture, norms, rituals, and conventions. From early childhood, humans show an intriguing willingness to imitate behaviors, even those that have no obvious function. This phenomenon, known as "over-imitation," is thought to explain some of the key differences between human cultures as compared with those of nonhuman animals. Here, we used a single integrative paradigm to simultaneously investigate several key factors proposed to shape children's over-imitation: age, context, transitivity, and action type. We compared typically developing children aged 4-6years in a task involving actions verbally framed as being instrumental, normative, or communicative in function. Within these contexts, we explored whether children were more likely to over-imitate transitive versus intransitive actions and manual versus body part actions. Results showed an interaction between age and context; as children got older, they were more likely to imitate within a normative context, whereas younger children were more likely to imitate in instrumental contexts. Younger children were more likely to imitate transitive actions (actions on objects) than intransitive actions compared with older children. Our results show that children are highly sensitive to even minimal cues to perceived context and flexibly adapt their imitation accordingly. As they get older, children's imitation appears to become less object bound, less focused on instrumental outcomes, and more sensitive to normative cues. This shift is consistent with the proposal that over-imitation becomes increasingly social in its function as children move through childhood and beyond.

The Social Function of Imitation in Development

“…found that children imitated more faithfully when they were told that the action represented a social convention. Similar results were later found by Clay, Over & Tennie (2018) who tested 4-to 6-year-old British children and found that the older children in their sample were more likely to copy the modelled actions faithfully when these actions had been framed as a social convention.…”

The Social Glue of Cumulative Culture and Ritual Behavior

“…Overimitation satisfies social motives, be they affiliative or normative . For example, in one study , 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds sat opposite two adults.…”

Preparedness in cultural learning

“…Lyons et al (2007) conclude, "children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful" (p. 19,751). Recently, Clay et al (2018) showed that over the course of early development, children move from roundly overimitating to selectively overimitating. Together, this evidence supports the argument for increased preparation of the motivation to imitate in humans; a prepared tendency to imitate first and then refine the deployment of imitation at later ages (also see Flynn et al 2016).…”