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

Abstract

We investigated children's understanding of directed motion events using an Imitation Choice paradigm. Thirty-four children (mean age 33 months) watched a model act out an event containing a manner of motion (hopping or sliding), a motion path (up or down a ramp), and a goal (in or on a bowl). On the child's apparatus, the locations of the goal objects were different from the model so that the child had to choose whether to imitate the path or the goal of the model's event. Children's choice of which component to imitate therefore reflects how they prioritize these event components. Most children showed no bias to imitate the goal of the event, and instead preferred to imitate the model's path at the expense of the model's goal. However, children who spontaneously played with the goal objects during a free-play session showed a diminished path preference, choosing to imitate path and goal components equally often. We suggest that children's prioritization of information within an event depends on how that information is structured within the event itself. Keywordsimitation; event representation; toddler; directed-motion event; goals Imitation is an important tool of social learning that allows humans to replay an event that just occurred in the same way they witnessed it. It is also an important window onto children's representations: successful imitation requires a child to adequately represent the event in question. Moreover, for revealing how they represent and organize information, children's failures are as important as their successes. For example, a child who successfully imitates a model's ultimate goal while failing to imitate the model's process steps (a case of "emulation") most likely has a representation of the event that privileges or prioritizes the goal of the event. And indeed, the dominant finding in the literature is that infants and toddlers are goal-biased in their representations. However, generalizing from children's failures and omissions is not without difficulty. A child who fails too often may simply not have the ability to do the task; a child who fails too rarely may not make representative mistakes. In addition, there is the problem of interpreting null results: children might fail to do something for many reasons. Obviously, systematic patterns of success and failure can be quite meaningful -and many such patterns will be discussed below. However, the method adopted in this paper opts for a different solution, by forcing children to make choices.

Nonverbal imitation skills in children with specific language delay

“…It has been argued that elicited imitation is not simply a one-to-one mimicking but rather an interpretation of an event which depends on children"s abilities to perceive, map, recode and reproduce demonstrated stimuli. Hence, elicited imitation taps children"s cognitive processing (Gleissner, Meltzoff, & Bekkering, 2000;Wagner, Yocom, & Greene-Havas, 2008), and children"s errors in replicating target acts provide a window onto how they process demonstrated information. A range of competencies are thought to be involved in imitation behaviour, e.g.…”

Movement or goal: Goal salience and verbal cues affect preschoolers’ imitation of action components

“…This criterion deemed a minimal standard to ensure that children possessed the necessary motor and representational skills and that their behavior during the imitation choice phase represented a meaningful choice between the components (Wagner et al, 2008). Most of the children (66%) imitated the two action components already in the first direct imitation trial, 12% of the children needed two trials, 8% needed three trials, and 14% needed four trials.…”

“…As can be seen in Table 1, the patterns of behavior were not evenly distributed in the two groups and in the trials with different verbal cues. Second, we calculated preference scores, indicating the degree to which children's behavior matched the model's demonstration of the movement or goal component in the given trials (see Wagner et al, 2008). Each trial was scored as +1 if the child performed the observed movement at the expense of the goal component, as -1 if the child performed the observed goal at the expense of the movement component, and as 0 if the trial demonstrated either of the other choices.…”

“…We modeled our task after Wagner, Yocom, and Greene-Havas (2008). In their imitation choice task, 2-and 3-year-olds watched a model performing directed motion events with a puppet on a small ramp.…”

On the Imitation of Goal Directed Movements of a Humanoid Robot

“…However, further research would be needed to clarify this issue. For HHI, it was found that people shift to imitating the movement trajectories when the saliency of the goals is low [50][51][52]. Indeed we found that many subjects reproduced the curvedness of the robot's pointing movements even though this was only necessary to prevent the robot from hitting its knee.…”