Which Relevant Information Do Preschoolers and Scholars Perceive and Select for Imitating a Series of Walking Movements

Labiadh, Lazhar; Ramanantsoa, Marie-Martine; Mounir, L; olsi,

doi:10.4172/2375-4494.1000221

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…For instance, Williamson and colleagues (2008) We also found that transitivity also interacted with age: specifically, younger children were more likely to imitate transitive actions as opposed to intransitive actions as compared to older children. Related to the above points, about young children's tendencies to depend on instrumental learning (Williamson et al, 2008); this effect may be due to the fact that young children may perceive transitive actions to have more causal-relevance than intransitive actions (Kim et al, 2015;Labiadh et al, 2015;Patrick & Richman, 1985). This perceptual bias appears to part of an evolutionary continuum as captive non-human animals trained to imitate actions in 'Do-as-I-do' tasks are also more likely to copy transitive actions than intransitive ones (Huber et al, 2009;.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Clay

Over

Tennie

2018

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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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.

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