Children’s Imitation is not Always Goal-Directed: Evidence from Goal Clarification Task

Adding Acoustical to Visual Movement Patterns to Retest Whether Imitation Is Goal- or Pattern-Directed

“…For example, when, in a goal-directed action, the saliency of the limb is increased (with a color cue), imitation of the limb is more accurate than imitating the goal (Bird et al, 2007). Mizuguchi et al (2014) also showed that despite the goal of the task, the most emphasized movement part was more accurately imitated; thus, their results supported generalist theories of imitation. Hayes, Ashford, and Bennett (2008) asserted that when the end goal and the pattern of achieving the end goal are directly interconnected, the pattern gains sufficient weight in the goal hierarchy for the model's movement to be imitated.…”

“…The difference between my research and Longo et al (2008) is that Longo et al (2008) made salient the verbal instruction presented to participants before presenting the pattern, while I made salient the audio pattern and presented it simultaneously with the visual movement pattern. Mizuguchi et al (2014) also showed that the part of the movement that received a relative emphasis was imitated more precisely. Cattaneo, Sandrini, and Schwarzbach (2010) argued that the human representation of actions is hierarchically organized such that, while the low-level modality is related to a description of physical features of movement, such as the muscular pattern and the effector muscle involved in executing an observed operation (movement coding), the higher level modality is responsible for transforming the perceptual features of the observed scene into an abstract coding of movement, independent of physical features (goal coding) and is often triggered by observing objective actions.…”

“…Goal-directed theories assert that imitation is influenced by the goals extracted from observed movements, whereas generalist theories state that imitation is affected by the salience of the movement components, rather than goals. (Mizuguchi, Shimada, Sugimura, & Deguchi, 2014). The goal-directed imitation theory, proposed by Bekkering et al (2000) and Wohlschla¨ger et al (2003), states that imitation is guided cognitively by specified goals such that the imitator does not imitate the observed movement as a whole but, instead, disassembles it into its separate hierarchically ordered components (limb, path, end state, etc.…”

“…As mentioned earlier, previous studies have employed a variety of methods to steer the imitator's attention away from the goal toward the movement, such as by highlighting with different colors the various effectors or tools used in the task (Bird et al, 2007) or by providing verbal instructions (Mizuguchi et al, 2014). However, the method of highlighting effectors or tools presents general information about the effectors or about the course of the movement, but it does not provide information about how to perform the movement.…”