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Young children overimitate in third-party contexts
Abstract
The exhibition of actions that are causally unnecessary to the outcomes with which they are associated is a core feature of human cultural behavior. To enter into the world(s) of their cultural in-group, children must learn to assimilate such unnecessary actions into their own behavioral repertoire. Past research has established the habitual tendency of children to adopt the redundant actions of adults demonstrated directly to them. Here we document how young children will do so even when such actions are modeled to a third person regardless of whether children are presented with the test apparatus by the demonstrating, and assumedly expert, adult or by the observing, and assumedly naive, adult (Experiment 1), whether or not children had opportunity to discover how the apparatus works prior to modeling (Experiment 1), and whether or not children's attention was drawn to the demonstration while they were otherwise occupied (Experiment 2). These results emphasize human children's readiness to acquire behavior that is in keeping with what others do, regardless of the apparent efficiency of the actions employed, and in so doing to participate in cultural learning.
... In line with these social accounts, a more recent model tries to combine explanations for overimitation focusing on social motivations and explanations for selective imitation focusing on goal-directed motivations. Over and Carpenter (2012a;2012b) suggested that children's tendency to copy observed actions depend on their goals in specific situations. These goals could either be learning goals (i.e., learning about the function of an apparatus), social goals (i.e., establishing a good relationship with somebody), or a combination of both (i.e., following the rules of a game). ...
... To explain the findings of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of our experiments, I would like to propose a new explanatory model (see Figure 2), that combines Whiten's "copy first -refine later" approach ) and Over and Carpenter's approach (Over & Carpenter, 2012a;2012b) focusing on social and learning goals leading to different copying behavior. My explanatory model contains two different modes of copying. ...
... Therefore, the model of Over and Carpenter (2012a;2012b) applies to the mode of reflective copying. As mentioned above, they distinguish between: (a) "learning goals," that lead to selective imitation based on functional considerations; (b) "social goals," which motivate children to imitate faithfully and (c) a combination of both, which focus children's attention on "how" something is typically done. ...
Over evolutionary time, humans have come to populate the most varied environments on planet earth and somehow managed to survive. The key to this extraordinary adaptability seems to rest not exclusively in biological adaptions, but also in cultural adaptations; it is thanks to the skills and information that are transmitted to us from others (i.e. through social learning) that we manage to survive and thrive in such diverse ecologies. One special form of social learning is the imitation of causally irrelevant actions. The imitation of actions that are perceivably irrelevant to reach a certain goal seems to be unique to humans and has been termed ‘overimitation’. At first sight, copying goal irrelevant actions seems to be an inefficient learning strategy. Therefore, the legitimate question arises: Why do we do so? It has been discussed that humans overimitate either because of erroneous causal reasoning, meaning that they do not recognize demonstrated actions as being irrelevant or because of social motivations, e.g., because they want to follow a norm or want to affiliate with the demonstrator. In this thesis, I present three different studies, which tested these explanatory models. Taken together, results of these studies gave reason to think that one of these accounts standing alone is insufficient to explain the phenomenon. Therefore, I am introducing a dual-mode model for overimitation. One mode is blanket copying. Here, irrelevant actions are copied independent of contextual differences. While copying in a blanket fashion, children heuristically copy irrelevant actions without questioning their necessity. This mode is triggered by actions which involve physical contact with the testing object, because it is harder to recognize such actions as being irrelevant. The other mode is reflective copying. Here, whether or not children overimitate is dependent on their goals in a certain situation. This mode of copying is triggered by actions that do not involve physical contact with the testing object can be easily recognized as being causally irrelevant, or by observing a more efficient strategy (not including irrelevant actions). If disclosing the irrelevancy of the demonstrated actions, children’s focus is directed to an alternate efficient option to reach the desired goal. Then, they can actively decide if they would like to copy the demonstrated irrelevant actions or not. Therefore, reflected copying is context depended. According to this integrative framework, overimitation can occur in a blanket and in a reflected fashion. Thus, this model emphasizes that the same observable behavior can have different underlying motivations.
... Children are committed social learners [1,2] disposed to encode and adopt the beliefs and skills displayed by others [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. They may copy with great fidelity, but children can also be highly selective in whom they choose to copy [14]. ...
... We included 4-to-7-year-old children to examine whether there is a developmental progression in the degree of copying faithfully and whether there are differences in development according to context. We chose these ages because previous research has shown that older preschool and school-age children within this range show an increase in overall high fidelity imitation of social information compared to younger children [1,13,42,43] and children as young as four have shown that they are selective in choosing reliable individuals for information (e.g., [25,31]). ...
... We judged it unnecessary to run an experiment to test for copying of a majority per se, because such effects have been amply confirmed in similar, actionbased research [7,10,18]. Because we found that older children were more likely to copy an expert in the normative condition and because previous studies have shown that older preschool and school-age children tend to imitate more faithfully [1,13,42,43], we collected a larger sample to include both a younger age group (4-to 5-year-olds) and an older age group (6-to 7-year-olds) to examine any developmental differences for how younger or older children select whom they choose to copy and whether imitative fidelity changes with age. ...
This study examined whether instrumental and normative learning contexts differentially influence 4- to 7-year-old children’s social learning strategies; specifically, their dispositions to copy an expert versus a majority consensus. Experiment 1 (N = 44) established that children copied a relatively competent “expert” individual over an incompetent individual in both kinds of learning context. In experiment 2 (N = 80) we then tested whether children would copy a competent individual versus a majority, in each of the two different learning contexts. Results showed that individual children differed in strategy, preferring with significant consistency across two different test trials to copy either the competent individual or the majority. This study is the first to show that children prefer to copy more competent individuals when shown competing methods of achieving an instrumental goal (Experiment 1) and provides new evidence that children, at least in our “individualist” culture, may consistently express either a competency or majority bias in learning both instrumental and normative information (Experiment 2). This effect was similar in the instrumental and normative learning contexts we applied.
... The cognitive account argues that overimitation results from a belief based on causal distortions that all actions demonstrated by an individual, necessary or unnecessary, are essential to accomplish the task (Lyons et al., 2007(Lyons et al., , 2011. On the other hand, the social account claims that overimitation is driven by social motivations to affiliate with the individual who performs the sequence of actions (Nielsen & Blank, 2011;Nielsen et al., 2012;Watson-Jones et al., 2014). From the normative point of view, whereas overimitation is perceived as irrational in a strictly instrumental aspect, inefficient and efficient actions are combined to achieve a conventional goal (Keupp et al., 2013). ...
... Accordingly, we specifically investigated the overimitation rate in traditionally schooled versus Montessori-schooled children in the specific context of adult models. In comparison with traditionally schooled children, do children experiencing daily peer-to-peer learning instead of adult-driven learning show a lower tendency to overimitate as expected by both the social motivation and normative accounts (Keupp et al., 2013;Nielsen & Blank, 2011;Nielsen et al., 2012;Watson-Jones et al., 2014)? To answer this question, Study 2 investigated the potential effects of schooling experience on the overimitation rate of adult demonstrators. ...
... There is also the phenomenon of overimitation, whereby children imitate causally irrelevant parts of an action they learn to perform from others (see the opening discussions in Kenward 2012 andNielsen et al. 2012). This behavior was first thought to result from confusion about the causal conditions for the actions in question (Lyons et al. 2007). ...
... Speaking about the phenomenon of overimitation discussed in Sect. 4.2,Nielsen et al. (2012), pp. 81-2, say that "[a] proclivity to overimitate presents itself as a prime functional conduit of the intergenerational transmission of cultural behavior and ideas." ...
Many philosophers working today on the normativity of language have concluded that linguistic activity is not a matter of rule following. These conversations have been framed by a conception of linguistic normativity with roots in Wittgenstein and Kripke. In this paper I use conceptual resources developed by the classical American pragmatists and their descendants to argue that punctate linguistic acts are governed by rules in a sense that has been neglected in the recent literature on the normativity of language. In the course of arguing for this conclusion I defend a Kantian conception of rationality as rule-obeying activity, and I argue that this conception is compatible with a naturalistic understanding of ourselves as rational beings governed by rules of thought and action.
... In some cases, children copy so faithfully that they are even willing to copy actions that are visibly causally irrelevant, a phenomenon known as ''over-imitation" (Horner & Whiten, 2005;Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007;Over & Carpenter, 2012, 2013. Whereas other animals may show some competence toward imitation (Bugnyar & Huber, 1997;Huber et al., 2009), over-imitation itself appears to be a uniquely human phenomenon and, as such, is sometimes discussed as a hallmark of human culture (Clay & Tennie, 2017;Horner & Whiten, 2005;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Tennie, Call, & Tomasello, 2012). ...
... As a result, we explored over-imitation behavior in children from 4 to 6 years. Children at this age show strong tendencies toward imitation and have been widely used in other studies, allowing for direct comparison (e.g., Clay & Tennie, 2017;Clegg & Legare, 2015Horner & Whiten, 2005;Kenward, 2012;Legare & Nielsen, 2015;Legare & Watson-Jones, 2015;Lyons et al., 2007;McGuigan et al., 2007;McGuigan et al., 2011;McGuigan et al., 2012;Moraru et al., 2016;Nielsen et al., 2012;Over & Carpenter, 2012, 2013Whiten et al., 2016). We predicted that there would be a significant interaction between age and context. ...
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.
... Learning from others in such contexts can be regarded as "third-party observation" (e.g., Matheson, Moore, & Akhtar, 2013). Findings from studies examining third-party contexts show that when infants and young children observe an adult demonstrating actions to another adult, children may copy those actions, even though the child was not the intended addressee (e.g., Matheson et al., 2013;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Shimpi, Akhtar, & Moore, 2013;Shneidman, Todd, & Woodward, 2014). For example, after observing an adult demonstrating causally non-obvious actions with different objects (children's toys) to another adult, 2-year-olds imitated the model's actions regardless of whether the actions were directed at the child or at the other adult (Shneidman et al., 2014). ...
In two separate experiments, we examined 17-month-olds’ imitation in a third-party context. The aim was to explore how seeing another person responding to a model’s novel action influenced infant imitation. The infants watched while a reliable model demonstrated a novel action with a familiar (Experiment 1) or an unfamiliar (Experiment 2) object to a second actor. The second actor either imitated or did not imitate the novel action of the model. Fewer infants imitated the model’s novel behavior in the non-imitation condition than in the imitation condition in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, infants’ likelihood of imitating was not influenced by whether they had watched the second actor imitating the model’s novel action with the unfamiliar object. The findings indicate that infants take into account a second adult’s actions in a third party context when infants receive information that contradicts their existing knowledge and when it corresponds with their own experiences. If infants do not have prior knowledge about how to handle a certain object, then the second adult’s actions do not seem to matter.
... . They display an early developing propensity to learn via imitation, even to the striking extent of copying actions that have no perceivable causal value, a phenomenon termed "over-imitation" (Horner & Whiten, 2005;Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen et al., 2012). Through such faithful replication, children progressively acquire the wealth of human skill repertories necessary for them to become competent adults. ...
Costly rituals are ubiquitous and adaptive. Yet, little is known about how children develop to acquire them. The current study examined children's imitation of costly rituals. Ninety‐three 4–6 year olds (47 girls, 45% Oceanians, tested in 2022) were shown how to place tokens into a tube to earn stickers, using either a ritualistic or non‐ritualistic costly action sequence. Children shown the ritualistic actions imitated faithfully at the expense of gaining stickers; conversely, those shown the non‐ritualistic actions ignored them and obtained maximum reward. This highlights how preschool children are adept at and motivated to learn rituals, despite significant material cost. This study provides insights into the early development of cultural learning and the adaptive value of rituals in group cognition.
... First, findings from cross-cultural and anthropological studies show systematic variation in the extent to which infants encounter child-directed interactions, and in how much they are expected to learn from observing others (Correa-Chávez & Rogoff, 2009;Gaskins & Paradise, 2010;Keller, 2007;Paradise & Rogoff, 2009;Shneidman, Gaskins, & Woodward, 2016; for a review see . Second, in cultural contexts where children typically experience high levels of direct pedagogy, toddlers around their second birthday imitate actions and learn novel word labels equally well when directly addressed as when they observe a social interaction between third parties (Akhtar et al., 2001;Floor & Akhtar, 2006;Gampe et al., 2012;Matheson et al., 2013;Nielsen et al., 2012;Shneidman et al., 2014). To gain a comprehensive picture of the multiple facets of social learning in the first year of life, studies on observation-based forms of learning are needed in addition to participatory forms. ...
Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task during which they saw an adult looking either in the direction of the infant (eye contact) or to the side (no eye contact) before and after looking at an object. Following an occlusion phase, infants saw one of three different outcomes: the same object reappeared at the same screen position (no change), the same object reappeared at a novel position (location change), or a novel object appeared at the same position (identity change). We found that infants looked longer at identity change outcomes (vs. no changes) in the “eye contact” condition compared to the “no eye contact” condition. In contrast, infants’ response to location changes was not influenced by the presence of eye contact. In Experiment 2, we found the same result pattern in a matched third-party design, in which another sample of N = 36 9-month-old German infants saw two adults establishing eye contact (or no eye contact) before alternating their gaze between an object and their partner without ever looking at the infant. These findings indicate that infants learn similarly from interacting with others and observing others interact, suggesting that infant cultural learning extends beyond infant-directed interactions.
... Of course, play is not the only possible explanation for seeming violations of rational action. Many valuable behaviors (social norms and rituals, steps necessary for effective tool use, safety procedures, etc.) are cognitively opaque (see e.g., Kenward et al., 2011;Keupp et al., 2013Keupp et al., , 2018Rakoczy et al., 2008) and researchers have suggested that children's tendency to imitate even seemingly unnecessary, inefficient actions may be critical for transmitting both instrumental skills and social conventions (Horner & Whiten, 2005;Keupp et al., 2018;Legare & Nielsen, 2015;Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Over & Carpenter, 2013;see Hoehl et al., 2019 for review). Seemingly inefficient actions can also indicate that the actor's goal was simply to perform the movements for their own sake, such as in dance (Schachner & Carey, 2013) or were intended as communicative gestures (Royka et al., 2022), instead of reaching for or manipulating other objects. ...
Recent studies suggest children’s exploratory play is consistent with formal accounts of rational learning. Here we focus on the tension between this view and a nearly ubiquitous feature of human play: In play, people subvert normal utility functions, incurring seemingly unnecessary costs to achieve arbitrary rewards. We show that four-and-five-year-old children not only infer playful behavior from observed violations of rational action (Experiment 1), but themselves take on unnecessary costs during both retrieval (Experiment 2) and search (Experiments 3A–B) tasks, despite acting efficiently in non-playful, instrumental contexts. We discuss the value of such apparently utility-violating behavior and why it might serve learning in the long run.
... Something interesting happens with children, however, around 3 years of age. Now children will engage in overimitation, copying all actions of a model, both relevant and irrelevant (Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen et al., 2015). For example, in a pioneering study (Lyons et al., 2007), preschool children watched adults perform a series of actions on a puzzle box to retrieve a toy. ...
In this article I examine children’s evolved learning mechanisms that make humans the most educable of animals. These include: (1) skeletal perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that get fleshed out over the course of development, mainly through play; (2) a high level of plasticity that is greatest early in life but that persists into adulthood; (3) remarkable social-learning capabilities; and (4) dispositions toward exploration and play. I next examine some evolutionary mismatches – conflicts between psychological mechanisms evolved in ancient environments and their utility in modern ones – specifically with respect to modern educational systems. I then suggest some ways educators can take advantage of children’s evolved learning abilities to minimize the effects of evolutionary mismatches, including: (1) following developmentally appropriate practices (which are also evolutionarily appropriate practices); (2) increasing opportunities for physical activities; (3) increasing opportunities to learn through play; and (4) taking advantage of stress-adapted children’s “hidden talents.” I argue that evolutionary theory informs teachers and parents about how children evolved to learn and can result in more-enlightened teaching methods that will result in a more enjoyable and successful learning experiences for children.
Key Terms: plasticity; social learning; exploration; play; evolutionary mismatches; developmentally appropriate practice
... Results from a series of recent studies have suggested that preschool children's imitation of novel target acts is influenced by the children's own prior self-experience (Williamson et al., 2008;Williamson and Meltzoff, 2011;Wood et al., 2013;Schleihauf et al., 2018; see also Nielsen et al., 2012). For example, in Williamson et al.'s (2008) study, preschool children were randomly assigned to two prior-experience groups. ...
... Results from a series of recent studies have suggested that preschool children's imitation of novel target acts is influenced by the children's own prior self-experience (Williamson et al., 2008;Williamson and Meltzoff, 2011;Wood et al., 2013;Schleihauf et al., 2018; see also Nielsen et al., 2012). For example, in Williamson et al.'s (2008) study, preschool children were randomly assigned to two prior-experience groups. ...
Both prior experience and pedagogical cues modulate Western children’s imitation. However, these factors have not been systematically explored together within a single study. This paper explored how these factors individually and together influence imitation using 4-year-old children born and reared in mainland China (N = 210)—a country that contains almost one-fifth of the world’s population, and in which childhood imitation is under-studied using experimental methodology. The behavior of children in this culture is of special interest to theory because traditional East Asian culture places high value on conformity and fitting in with the group. Thus, high-fidelity imitation is emphasized in the local culture. This value, practice, or norm may be recognized by children at a young age and influence their imitative performance. In this study, we crossed prior self-experience and pedagogical cues, yielding four demonstration groups in addition to a control group. This design allowed us to investigate the degree to which Chinese preschoolers’ imitation was modulated by the two experimental factors. High-fidelity imitation was significantly modulated by prior self-experience but not by pedagogical cues, as measured by the number of novel acts imitated and also the serial order of these acts. This study (i) expands our understanding of factors that modulate imitation of novel behaviors in preschoolers and (ii) contributes to efforts to broaden research beyond Western societies to enrich our theories, particularly regarding social learning and imitation. Imitation is a key mechanism in the acquisition of culturally appropriate behaviors, mannerisms, and norms but who, what, and when children imitate is malleable. This study points to both cross-cultural invariants and variations to provide a fuller picture of the scope and functions of childhood imitation.
... A set of experiments with children provided evidence that this phenomenon occurs even when the context of copying unnecessary actions is unfavorable for them to do so (countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings; see Lyons, Damrosch, Lin, Macris, & Keil, 2011;Lyons et al., 2007). Other studies have shown that overimitation persists in widely different contexts: from live or video demonstrations (McGuigan, Whiten, Flynn, & Horner, 2007) to when the task is demonstrated to third parties and not to the investigated observers themselves (Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012). Overimitation occurs in different cultures (Nielsen, Mushin, Tomaselli, & Whiten, 2014) and in naturalistic contexts (Whiten et al., 2016). ...
Overimitation is defined by a tendency to copy all actions executed by a model, even the clearly irrelevant ones. The motivational mechanisms and functionality of overimitation are still not well understood, but its possible adaptive meaning could be related to causal opacity of a great part of socially learned behaviors. This phenomenon has been widely replicated in several contexts and has been observed in the behavior of children over 2 years of age and even in adults. Despite the seeming robustness of overimitation, studies have shown that it is sensitive to some characteristics of a model observed such as age, familiarity, proficiency, and reputation. Our work intended to investigate the effect of information about the competence of an adult model on the copying of irrelevant actions by preschool children (5 years old) in a task. We tested the influence of self-declared information about the model competence and of the same kind of information given by third parties in a conversation about the model. Our results reveal no effect of both “self-declared competence” and “reputation” biases on overimitation. We discuss that this result may have occurred because other information available to participants, and not manipulated by us, was used to infer model competence such as the model’s age and success in the task directly observed by the participants. Another potential explanation is that children use a “copy all, correct later” strategy in a context where only one model is available.
... Aunque este tipo de metodología se ha utilizado frecuentemente con niños entre 3 y 4,5 años (Gardiner, 2014;Kenward, 2012;Keupp, Bancken, Schillmöller, Rakoczy & Behne, 2016;Keupp, Behne & Rakoczy, 2013;Keupp, Behne, Zachow, Kasbohm & Rakoczy, 2015;Király, Csibra & Gergely 2013;Lyons, Young & Keil, 2007;McGuigan, Whiten, Flynn & Horner, 2007;Nielsen, Moore & Mohamedally, 2012;Taniguchi & Sanefuji, 2017), algunos autores introducen ciertas variaciones en las condiciones para investigar el desarrollo de la comprensión intencional en edades más tempranas -entre los 12 y 14 meses- (Gellén & Buttelmann, 2017;Zmyj, Daum & Aschersleben, 2009). Los cambios realizados repercuten, a su vez, en la interpretación de las acciones del niño. ...
La investigación sobre las habilidades cognitivas de los niños que sustentan la intencionalidad compartida viene desarrollándose con mucha fuerza en los últimos años. El presente artículo contiene una discusión sobre las metodologías usadas en el campo, para lo cual se revisaron investigaciones publicadas entre 2005 y 2017 cuyo tema principal es la intencionalidad compartida. Como resultado, se propone una distinción general entre 2 posturas: aquellas metodologías que son activas o que requieren respuestas conductuales que incluyen movimiento por parte del infante y aquellas que son pasivas o que se basan en las reacciones visuales o emocionales del niño. Se presenta un análisis crítico del uso de dichas metodologías, de sus alcances y limitaciones. Finalmente, se propone que las tensiones y discusiones a nivel metodológico pueden tener de fondo diferencias teóricas respecto al abordaje del fenómeno.
... As pointed out by Elsner (2007), imitation studies in developmental psychology have predominantly focused on the reproduction of target actions (or "effective" actions), that is, sequences of movements performed in order to initiate determined and desired changes in the environment (e.g., Brugger et al., 2007;Flynn & Whiten, 2008;Lyons et al., 2007;McGuigan et al., 2007;Nielsen et al., 2012). In contrast, imitation of "effect-less" actions (such as the production of a mere succession of body movements) has been less studied. ...
... Whiten et al. (2016) demonstrated that children (as well as adults) over-imitated a stranger's actions on a puzzle box in a real-world scenario, in which the participants were unaware that they were taking part in an experiment. This finding corroborates the notion that OI can be a vehicle for culturally opaque knowledge and thus play an important role in human cultural evolution (Legare & Nielsen, 2015;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012) rather than being merely an artefact of experimental situations. However, this does not necessarily mean that OI rates in more controlled experimental settings are not biased towards pervading normative tendencies and implicit social demands that might affect participants' behavior. ...
After seeing an action sequence children and adults tend to copy causally relevant and, more strikingly, even perceivably unnecessary actions in relation to the given goal. This phenomenon, termed “over-imitation”, has inspired much empirical research in the past decade as well as lively theoretical debate on its cognitive underpinnings and putative role in the transmission of cultural knowledge. Here, we offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature to date, accompanied by a table including concise information on 54 published studies testing over-imitation in different species, age groups and cultures. We highlight methodological issues related to task and context that influence over-imitation rates and that should be carefully considered in study designs. We discuss the cognitive and motivational processes underlying and contributing to over-imitation, including normative action parsing, causal reasoning, motives of affiliation and social learning as well as their complex interplay. We conclude that despite the apparent irrationality of over-imitation behavior, recent studies have shown that its performance depends on the specific task, modeled actions and context variables, suggesting that over-imitation should be conceptualized as a contextually flexible and, in fact, a normally highly functional phenomenon.
... In contrast to chimpanzees, humans switch between individual strategies and pedantic copying, particularly at a younger age and in relation to their social context (Shimpi et al. 2013). Given the correlation between imitation of unnecessary actions and acquisition of cultural practices (Nielsen et al. 2012), young humans seem to imitate and over-imitate much more in the presence of adult (competent) demonstrators, paying particular attention to adults' actions (McGuigan et al. 2011;Harris 2012;Wood et al. 2012Wood et al. , 2013a. In one study, 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds were left watching an adult retrieving a toy from a closed box by disengaging a switch located on the front of the box (Nielsen 2006). ...
The creation of cultural information by humans is an ability that requires to compound together different factors. Although information needs to be transmitted faithfully enough so to prevent errors, space must be left to create innovations at the same time. Individual trial and error is the principal source of innovations among all primate species, especially in emulative contexts, but it does not explain the quantity, quality or rapidity of human cultural production. On the other hand, imitation and (over)imitation explain quite well faithful transmission and error control but do not explain the creation of cultural novelties nor the ratchet effect of human culture. To explain these latter components, we need a combination of trial and error in emulative contexts and (over)imitation. Here we suggest that this combination of the ability in creating innovations and transmitting them faithfully occurred for the first time during the Palaeolithic. In that time frame, we can detect the establishment of imitation as the main social learning strategy in the genus Homo. Adopting a niche construction (henceforth NC) paradigm, we propose that this combination became a social characteristic of Homo sapiens which ontogenetically happens when children reach the school age in modern humans.
... As a consequence, some maladaptive behaviours will be acquired [74]. For example, reliance on social learning has resulted in the copying of obviously causally irrelevant behaviours in children (e.g., [17,75,76]) and potentially the recent spread of fake news, where content-dependent biases may have an important role [77]. Maladaptive information cascades [4], whereby individuals disregard their own personal information in favour of following the decisions of others (not the cues on which those decisions are based), may also occur. ...
While social learning is widespread, indiscriminate copying of others is rarely beneficial. Theory suggests that individuals should be selective in what, when, and whom they copy, by following 'social learning strategies' (SLSs). The SLS concept has stimulated extensive experimental work, integrated theory, and empirical findings, and created impetus to the social learning and cultural evolution fields. However, the SLS concept needs updating to accommodate recent findings that individuals switch between strategies flexibly, that multiple strategies are deployed simultaneously, and that there is no one-to-one correspondence between psychological heuristics deployed and resulting population-level patterns. The field would also benefit from the simultaneous study of mechanism and function. SLSs provide a useful vehicle for bridge-building between cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.
... In line with past research (Hetherington et al., 2014), we hypothesized that children who are exposed to antisocial in-group behavior will show a reduction in liking ratings, as well as a reduction in imitation levels compared to those who are exposed to prosocial in-group behavior. Both imitation fidelity and the tendency to consider others' perspectives when making socio-moral judgements have been shown to increase with age (Cooley & Killen, 2015;Elenbaas et al., 2016;Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011;Killen, Mulvey, Richardson, Jampol, & Woodward, 2011;Lyons, Damrosch, Lin, Macris, & Keil, 2011;McGuigan et al., 2007;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012). As such, we predicted that older children would imitate more faithfully than younger children, but would also weigh antisocial behavior more heavily than younger children. ...
Children demonstrate a pervasive in‐group bias, preferring their in‐group across a range of contexts that encompass measures of liking, imitation, and, in some cases, resource allocation. A growing number of studies have begun to explore whether antisocial in‐group behavior reduces the robustness of this bias. However, these studies have focused on transgression evaluations, with only two studies focusing on social learning and none explicitly on imitation. This, therefore, limits the extent to which children's responses to interaction between in‐group bias and antisocial behavior can be fully understood. The current research expands on the prevailing literature, utilizing imitation as a behavioral measure to explore the reactions of children aged 4–5 and 7–8 years in response to antisocial in‐group behavior. Consistent with previous literature, antisocial in‐group behavior reduced in‐group liking ratings. Surprisingly, however, children's behavioral imitation preferences were guided solely by group membership, disregarding prosocial or antisocial behavior. These results indicate that children's explicitly reported social preferences and imitative preferences may be motivated by two independent drives.
... As pointed out by Elsner (2007), imitation studies in developmental psychology have predominantly focused on the reproduction of target actions (or "effective" actions), that is, sequences of movements performed in order to initiate determined and desired changes in the environment (e.g., Brugger et al., 2007;Flynn & Whiten, 2008;Lyons et al., 2007;McGuigan et al., 2007;Nielsen et al., 2012). In contrast, imitation of "effect- less" actions (such as the production of a mere succession of body movements) has been less studied. ...
Medimond International Proceedings, 47-50.
Given the importance of storytelling in the psychological development of young children and the fact that language and imaginative skills are often poorly developed in children living in an institutional context, the authors have implemented a research-action providing therapeutic group workshops to children with early painful family experiences. Each group is composed of 4 children, aged between 3-6 years old, placed in a residential child care facility. Method: The psychotherapy takes place once a week over a period of time comprised between 1 and 2 years and is given by 2 co-therapists using narrative and imagination related tools such as storytelling, psychodrama and projective techniques. These methods enable young children with relatively undeveloped self-expression skills to communicate important aspects of their inner experience. In order to assess the outcome of the psychotherapy on the children, the authors propose to study the shifts in the children's narratives and depictions over the course of the therapeutic workshops. Video recording was used as a data collection tool in order to gather verbal and non-verbal data and children's drawings were also collected (self-portrait drawings, drawings of a house and a person). Results: Data were analyzed in order to highlight the evolution of the narrative processes and discourse characteristics and also to point out the array of defensive and adaptive mechanisms, of children's self-conceptions and representations of attachment relationships. In the discussion, the authors will also stress the role of the spatial and temporal organization as well as the transitional objects as part of the psychotherapeutic process.
... However, Nielsen, Moore, and Mohamedally (2012) report that 4-year-old children imitate nonfunctional actions even when they have the chance to play with the test material beforehand. These conflicting findings may be due to the fact that Nielsen et al. (2012) did not differentiate between self-experience and social observation in their analysis, even though some children opened the test apparatus efficiently by themselves, and other children only saw it being opened efficiently by their parents, which may have had less of an impact on children's later performance. Further research supports the idea that prior experience through observation has less impact on children's imitation than prior experience through action. ...
Three experiments (N = 100) examine the influence of causal information on overimitation. In Experiment 1, a transparent reward location reveals that the reward is unaffected by nonfunctional actions. When 5-year-olds observe an inefficient and subsequently an efficient strategy to retrieve a reward, they show overimitation in both phases—even though the reward is visible. In Experiment 2, children observe first the efficient then the inefficient strategy. The latter is always demonstrated communicatively, whereas the efficient strategy is presented communicatively (2a) or noncommunicatively (2b). Regardless of whether the efficient strategy is emphasized through communication or not, most children do not switch from the efficient to the inefficient strategy. Depending on the situation, children base their behavior on social motivations or causal information.
... Socialmotivational explanations propose that overimitation might be http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.01.008 0010-0277/Ó 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. driven by social affiliation motives, including the imitator's motivation to experience social connectedness with the demonstrator and conform to the perceived norms of the social context (Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Over & Carpenter, 2012;Watson-Jones, Legare, Whitehouse, & Clegg, 2014). Several different perspectives of the social motivation account have been proposed (Kenward, Karlsson, & Persson, 2011;Lyons & Keil, 2013;Nielsen, Kapitany, & Elkins, 2015). ...
When imitating novel actions, typically developing preschoolers often copy components of the demonstration that are unrelated to the modeled action's goal, a phenomenon known as 'overimitation'. According to the social motivation account, overimitation fulfills social affiliation motives (i.e., the imitator's drive to experience social connectedness with the demonstrator and the social context). Conversely, according to the social-cognitive account, overimitation reflects overattribution of causal relevance (i.e., the imitator's failure to appreciate that some components of the demonstration are not relevant to the action's outcome). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and William syndrome (WS) are characterized by reduced and enhanced spontaneous social motivation, respectively, as well as similar impairments in social-cognition, thus providing helpful test cases to understand the nature of overimitation. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we examined overimitation in 31 preschoolers with ASD, 18 age- and IQ-matched peers with WS, and 19 age-matched typically developing children. We found that children with WS and typically developing children were more likely to overimitate, and to increase their attention to the model's face during demonstration of causally irrelevant actions, compared to those with ASD. These findings will be discussed in the context of support for the social-motivational account of overimitation.
... As pointed out by Elsner (2007), imitation studies in developmental psychology have predominantly focused on the reproduction of target actions (or "effective" actions), that is, sequences of movements performed in order to initiate determined and desired changes in the environment (e.g., Brugger et al., 2007;Flynn & Whiten, 2008;Lyons et al., 2007;McGuigan et al., 2007;Nielsen et al., 2012). In contrast, imitation of "effect-less" actions (such as the production of a mere succession of body movements) has been less studied. ...
This field study assesses children's relational attitude when they imitate other children. We observe that 3.7-to 5.4-years-old children show communicative attitude toward the model when they reproduce " effect-less " actions, but not when they copy target actions.
... (In addition, some children receive language lessons.) Likewise, young children in general are interested in engaging in the activities of those around them (Eckerman, Whatley, & McGhee, 1979;Hay, Murray, Cecire, & Nash, 1985;Meltzoff & Williamson, 2013;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Rheingold, 1982). LOPI brings young children worldwide-including middle-class childreninto the practices and routines of their families and communities, although extent of use of this way of learning varies with children's opportunities to be present and contribute (see Figure 20.2). ...
... Although it may appear at first glance surprising that human social learning could be so vulnerable to the acquisition of 'unwanted' behaviors, a suite of experiments have suggested that not only is the acquisition of suboptimal behavior possible [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], it can be extremely resistant to attempts to inhibit it [13][14][15]. An experimental analogue of such acquisition of suboptimal behaviors has been dubbed 'over-imitation' [7] to describe instances where observers copy the superfluous actions performed by a model with such a high level of fidelity that task efficiency is reduced. ...
The current study avoided the typical laboratory context to determine instead whether over-imitation-the disposition to copy even visibly, causally unnecessary actions-occurs in a real-world context in which participants are unaware of being in an experiment. We disguised a puzzle-box task as an interactive item available to the public within a science engagement zone of Edinburgh Zoo. As a member of the public approached, a confederate acting as a zoo visitor retrieved a reward from the box using a sequence of actions containing both causally relevant and irrelevant elements. Despite the absence of intentional demonstration, or social pressure to copy, a majority of both child and even adult observers included all causally irrelevant actions in their reproduction. This occurred even though causal irrelevance appeared manifest because of the transparency of the puzzle-box. That over-imitation occurred so readily in a naturalistic context, devoid of social interaction and pressure, suggests that humans are opportunistic social learners throughout the lifespan, copying the actions of other individuals even when these actions are not intentionally demonstrated, and their causal significance is not readily apparent. The disposition to copy comprehensively, even when a mere onlooker, likely provides humans, irrespective of their age, with a powerful mechanism to extract maximal information from the social environment.
... (Berndt, 1979Walker & Andrade, 1996. (Claidière & Whiten, 2012;DiYanni, Corriveau, Kurkul, Nasrini, & Nini, 2015;Haun, van Leeuwen, & Edelson, 2013;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012). Arguably the most striking cases of conformity are situations in which preschoolers conform to others' judgments even when they themselves know better (Corriveau & Harris, 2010;Corriveau, Kim, Song, & Harris, 2013;Walker & Andrade, 1996). ...
Children must sometimes decide between conforming to peer behavior and doing what is right. While research shows that children have a strong inclination to act prosocially and to help conspecifics in need, many studies also demonstrate that children tend to adopt peer behavior. In two studies (N = 96), we investigated whether children would conform to an antisocial majority or, whether they would do the right thing even under peer pressure. Results show that if a recipient is in need, 5-year-old children act prosocially in two different contexts even when there is a strong selfish incentive not to. However, once the severity of the recipient's need is reduced, children conform to the antisocial group. The current studies suggest that children's prosocial motivation sometimes wins out against more selfish drives.
... There is ample evidence that children under 2 years of age already use a variety of explicit cuessuch as gaze and pointing-in word learning and to process others' actions (Gräfenhain, Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009;Houston-Price et al., 2006; for a review, see Deák & Holt, 2008). This is even true for third-party or observational contexts in which infants witness a demonstration by another person that is not directed at them (e.g., Akhtar, 2005;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012). Given that 2-year-olds' word learning system is quite flexible (e.g., Altvater-Mackensen & Mani, 2013aMani, , 2013b, it would be particularly interesting to see whether 2-year-olds are equally proficient in employing implicit posture cues. ...
A considerable amount of research has examined children’s ability to rely on explicit social cues such as pointing to understand others’ referential intentions. Yet, skillful social interaction also requires reliance on and learning from implicit cues (i.e. cues that are not displayed with the explicit intention to teach or inform someone). From an embodied point of view, orienting movements and body orientation are salient cues that reveal something about a person’s intentional relations without being explicit communicative cues. In three experiments, the present study investigated the development of the ability to use body information in a word learning situation. To this end, we presented 2-year-old children, 3.5-year-old children, and adults with movies on an eye-tracking screen in which an actor oriented her upper body to one of two objects while uttering a novel word. The results show that the 3.5-year-old children and adults, but not the 2-year-old children related the novel word to the referred object (Experiment 1, Experiment 2). Yet, when the actor oriented her body to one object while pointing to the other object, children of both age groups relied on the pointing cue (Experiment 3). This suggests that by 3.5 years children use another’s body orientation as an indicator of her intentional relations, but that they prioritize explicit social cues over the implicit body posture cues. Overall, the study support theoretical views that an appreciation of others’ intentional relations does not emerge as an all-or-nothing ability, but rather gradually in the course of early development.
... 最 近 研 究 指 出 ， 二 至 三 歲 間 的 幼 兒 偏 好 忠 實 地 複製示範的動作細節(如與作業預設目標沒有因果 關聯的無關動作)，即便幼兒透過自我探索事先瞭 解與達成目標有關的因果機制(Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010)，或是 大人指示他們省略與目標無關的不必要動作(Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007;Nielsen & Blank, 2011)後，忠實 有 關 未 來 研 究 的 建 議 ， 釐 清 作 業 目 標 和 前 置 意參考文獻 Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2007). Learning from others' mistakes? ...
Previous research has shown that 3-year-old children benefit from observing a model’s failure to retrieve a reward in a trap-tube task before they are shown a correct solution (Want & Harris, 2001). In this study, we investigated whether the tendency to benefit from mistakes is influenced by the availability of causal information or the model’s intention. In two demonstration conditions, 30- and 41-month-old children (N = 116) observed an experimenter trap the reward before demonstrating how to obtain it with a tool from either a clear or an opaque tube. The clear tube made the causal properties of the task visible, whereas the opaque tube prevented them from being seen. In two other conditions, children were allowed to explore the task spontaneously or watched the experimenter manipulate the tool using actions irrelevant to retrieving the reward. Results indicated that both 30- and 41-month-old children imitated the demonstrated tool use regardless of the transparency of the task, but they did not show a bias in favor of the correct solution. However, when considering overall performance (reward retrieval achieved via both imitative and emulative strategies), 41-montholds were successful in retrieving, as opposed to trapping, the reward in the opaque condition. The facilitating effect of observing others’ mistakes is unlikely to be due solely to prior intention or causal understanding. We suggest that children flexibly vary the strategy they used to reproduce a model’s actions and action outcomes depending on what they perceive as relevant in the situation of the task.
... Yet, the role of the model's communicative behavior in overimitation studies with preschoolers is currently unclear because, to our knowledge, no study so far has directly compared children's imitation of obviously irrelevant actions performed by a pedagogical model compared with a completely non-communicative model. In a study by Nielsen, Moore, and Mohamedally (2012), the model did not demonstrate the actions to the child directly but rather demonstrated the actions to another adult (explicitly expressing his intention to ''show [someone] how to use this''). Children imitated irrelevant actions even though some of them had already discovered a more efficient way of achieving the goal. ...
Kinder lernen etwas über die Funktion von Dingen, indem sie ständig die Handlungen anderer Menschen beobachten und versuchen, diese nachzuahmen. Immer wieder imitieren sie aber auch Verhalten, das ganz offensichtlich nicht besonders effizient oder sogar unsinnig ist. Mit der Frage, warum sie dies tun und ob bereits Kleinkinder nach rationalen Erklärungsmöglichkeiten suchen, beschäftigen sich zwei neue Forschungsprojekte der Entwicklungspsychologinnen Prof. Dr. Sabina Pauen und Privatdozentin Dr. Stefanie Höhl vom Psychologischen Institut der Universität Heidelberg. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) fördert die beiden Projekte, die im Sommersemester 2015 starten, mit insgesamt rund 274.000 Euro.
... We chose 2.5-to 4.5-year-olds because there is mounting evidence of a developmental change in the fidelity of imitation in this age range (Dickerson, Gerhardstein, Zack, & Barr, 2013;McGuigan, Makinson, & Whiten, 2011;McGuigan et al., 2007;Moser et al., in press;Nielsen, 2006;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Sherwood, Subiaul, & Zawidzki, 2008;155 Subiaul et al., 2012). In addition, age-related imitation changes have been independently documented with variations of these tasks (Herbert & Hayne, 2000;McGuigan et al., 2007;Nielsen, 2006;Subiaul et al., 2012. ...
During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate 15 change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant changes. To that end, the present study examined whether task-independent but domain-specific—elemental— imitation mechanism explains performance across imitation tasks or domains. Preschool-age children (n = 156) were tested on 4 imitation tasks, 2 object-based (animal, puzzle box) and 2 computer-based (cognitive, motor-spatial). All tasks involved 3 serial actions. The animal task involved making an 20 animal face, and the puzzle box task involved manipulating a box to retrieve a reward. The cognitive task involved responding to 3 different pictures in a specific picture order, and the motor-spatial task involved responding to 3 identical pictures in a specific spatial order. A principal component analysis including performance on all 4 tasks produced 2 components: " cognitive imitation " (cognitive and animal tasks) and " motor-spatial imitation " (motor-spatial and puzzle box tasks). Regression ana-25 lyses replicated these results. These findings provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that underlying performance across these different tasks involves multiple—elemental—imitation mechanisms for learning and copying domain-specific information across tasks.
... This pretesting procedure also allowed us to determine whether children spontaneously stressed the second syllable and shared the experimenter's ''accent." We modeled these procedures after various studies in the artifact domain that include a ''prior experience" condition/phase (Hoehl, Zettersten, Schleihauf, Gratz, & Pauen, 2014;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Subiaul & Schilder, 2014;Williamson & Meltzoff, 2011). ...
... The work on overimitation suggests that when interacting with artifacts children are remarkably inflexible, imitating with highfidelity even when some of the action are causally meaningless and costly (Lyons et al., 2007(Lyons et al., , 2011Lyons, 2009). But, there is also evidence that children imitate flexibly and selectively, taking into consideration various social variables including the social context (Nielsen et al., 2012), task-difficulty (Williamson and Meltzoff, 2011), physical constraints (Gergely et al., 2002) and model's intent (Lyons et al., 2011) to name a few (for a review see: Over and Carpenter, 2012). ...
Children are exceptional, even ‘super,’ imitators but comparatively poor independent problem-solvers or innovators. Yet, imitation and innovation are both necessary components of cumulative cultural evolution. Here, we explored the relationship between imitation and innovation by assessing children’s ability to generate a solution to a novel problem by imitating two different action sequences demonstrated by two different models, an example of imitation by combination, which we refer to as “summative imitation.” Children (N = 181) from 3 to 5 years of age and across three experiments were tested in a baseline condition or in one of six demonstration conditions, varying in the number of models and opening techniques demonstrated. Across experiments, more than 75% of children evidenced summative imitation, opening both compartments of the problem box and retrieving the reward hidden in each. Generally, learning different actions from two different models was as good (and in some cases, better) than learning from 1 model, but the underlying representations appear to be the same in both demonstration conditions. These results show that summative imitation not only facilitates imitation learning but can also result in new solutions to problems, an essential feature of innovation and cumulative culture.
... By age 2, the tendency to overimitate has become so ubiquitous that children will even imitate causally irrelevant actions that they know are unnecessary to achieving an instrumental end-goal. For example, children will tap a stick on the side of a box and then persist in trying to use the stick to manipulate a switch to get the box open because that is what an adult model did, even after having discovered that the switch can be more easily activated by hand [21]. Available evidence suggests other primates do not overimitate [22]. ...
Imitation and innovation work in tandem to support cultural learning in children and facilitate our capacity for cumulative culture. Here we propose an integrated theoretical account of how the unique demands of acquiring instrumental skills and cultural conventions provide insight into when children imitate, when they innovate, and to what degree. For instrumental learning, with an increase in experience, high fidelity imitation decreases and innovation increases. In contrast, for conventional learning, imitative fidelity stays high, regardless of experience, and innovation stays low. We synthesize cutting edge research on the development of imitative flexibility and innovation to provide insight into the social learning mechanisms underpinning the uniquely human mind.
Observing others is an important means of gathering information by proxy regarding safety and danger, a form of learning that is available as early as infancy. In two experiments, we examined the specificity and retention of emotional eavesdropping (i.e., bystander learning) on cue-specific discriminant learning during toddlerhood. After witnessing one adult admonish another for playing with Toy A (with no admonishment for Toy B), toddlers learned to choose Toy B for themselves regardless of whether they were tested immediately or 2 weeks later (Experiment 1). However, if asked to make a toy choice for someone else (i.e., when toddlers’ personal risk was lower), approximately half the toddlers instead selected Toy A (Experiment 2). However, such choices were accompanied by toddlers’ social monitoring of the adults, suggesting that toddlers may have been attempting to safely gain (via surrogacy) more information about risk contingencies. These findings suggest that toddlers can learn to discriminate valence in a cue-specific manner through social observation.
The present study examined 17-month-olds’ imitation in a third-party context. In four experiments, the infants watched while a reliable or an unreliable model demonstrated a novel action with an unfamiliar (Experiments 1 and 3) or a familiar (Experiments 2 and 4) object to another adult. In Experiments 3 and 4, the second adult imitated the model’s novel action. Neither the familiarity of the object or whether or not the second adult copied the model’s behavior influenced the likelihood of infant imitation. Findings showed that the infants in the reliable model condition were more willing to imitate the model’s action with the unfamiliar object. The results suggest that infants take into account the reliability of a model even when the model has not directly demonstrated her reliability to the infant.
Part 1 The theory of Natural Pedagogy as proposed by Csibra and Gergely (2006, 2010) has provided a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of cultural learning. The theory suggested that ostensive communication in early interaction between the mother-infant dyad plays a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge. The three ostensive cues identified in that theory are eye contact, being addressed by name and contingent responsivity. This conceptual introduction provides a detailed review of the theory as well as the relevant literature. A critical evaluation of the empirical evidence presented in the body of literature suggests there are major limitations within that evidence, which as a consequence makes the empirical evidence fall short of offering robust support to the theory. This paper concludes by calling for development of a new instrument which allows for collecting data that is necessary for addressing these limitations. Part 2 Aim: (1) To develop the Ostensive Communication Coding System (OCCS). (2) To establish the psychometric properties of the OCCS. Method: Establish the behavioural operational definition and measurements of four ostensive communication – Eye contact, Name addressing, Infant Directed Speech and Contingent responsivity. Apply the OCCS to code videos of mother-infant interaction in two learning paradigms. Due to the occurrence of Covid-19, data collection was interrupted. The second aim of the study could not be fully achieved because of insufficient sample size. 14 infants aged 16 to 22 months took part in the study with their mother. Their interaction in the two learning paradigms are coded with OCCCS. Result: Interrater reliability of OCCS was assessed via intraclass correlation coefficients. Interrater reliability was excellent for all the scale components (> .90). Construct validity was tested with Parenting Stress Index, Fourth Edition Short Form (PSI-4-SF) and The Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire (PRFQ) via quasi-qualitative method, individual patterns of scores were observed. The results provided supportive evidence of the construct validity of OCCS Conclusion: The OCCS is likely to be a reliable and valid instruction to assess ostensive communication in natural pedagogical situation. Implications for future development are discussed.
The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and goal emulation is based in part on individual differences which emerge early in ontogeny. Experimental measurements and parental reports were collected for a group of 2‐year‐old children (N = 48, age = 23‐32 months) on their imitative behavior as well as other aspects of cognitive and social development. Results revealed individual differences in children's imitative behavior across trials and tasks which were best characterized by a model that included two behavioral routines; one corresponding to faithful imitation, and one to goal emulation. Moreover, individual differences in faithful imitation and goal emulation were correlated with individual differences in theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and temperament. These findings were discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the mechanisms of social learning, ontogeny of cumulative culture, and the benefit of analyzing individual differences for developmental experiments.
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Over-imitation has become a well-documented phenomenon. However there is evidence that both social and visible, physically causal factors can influence the occurrence of over-imitation in children. Here we explore the interplay between these two factors, manipulating both task opacity and social information. Four- to 7-year-old children were given either a causally opaque or transparent box, before which they experienced either (1) a condition where they witnessed a taught, knowledgeable person demonstrate an inefficient method and an untaught model demonstrate a more efficient method; or (2) a baseline condition where they witnessed efficient and inefficient methods performed by two untaught models. Results showed that the level of imitation increased with greater task opacity and when children received social information about knowledgeability consequent on teaching, but only for 6- to 7-year-olds. The findings show that children are selectively attuned to both causal and social factors when learning new cultural knowledge.
Young children enforce social norms from early on, but little research has examined how this enforcement behaviour emerges. This study investigated whether observing an adult's norm enforcement influences children's own enforcement of that norm compared with observing an action demonstration without enforcement. Additionally, children experienced enforcement either following their own (second‐party) or a third‐party's transgression (N = 120). Results revealed that observing enforcement increased two‐ and three‐year‐old children's protest against the sanctioned action regardless of second‐ or third‐party context. However, only three‐year‐olds generalized their enforcement to a novel action not matching the norm, whereas two‐year‐olds only protested against the previously sanctioned action. Importantly, without any enforcement demonstration, two‐year‐olds rarely protested at all while three‐year‐olds did so quite frequently. Thus, providing an opportunity to imitate enforcement seems to give rise to enforcement behaviour in two‐year‐olds while three‐year‐olds already understand normative implications following a variety of cues and even apply norm enforcement without any demonstration of how to do it.
Statement of contribution
What is already known on this subject?
• Children conform to social norms from early in development.
• Young children from 2 to 3 years of age also enforce social norms on third parties.
What does this study add?
• Observing enforcement by an adult increases two‐ and three‐year‐olds’ protest against the sanctioned action.
• It does not matter whether children experienced enforcement on their own or a third party's action.
• Three‐, but not two‐year‐olds, generalize their enforcement to novel actions that do not match the norm.
Children are both shrewd about whom to copy-they selectively learn from certain adults-and overimitators-they copy adults' obviously superfluous actions. Is overimitation also selective? Does selectivity change with age? In two experiments, 161 two- to seven-year-old children saw videos of one adult receiving better payoffs or more bystander attention than another. Children then watched the adults perform unnecessary actions on novel transparent devices. Children preferred the adult who received greater payoffs or bystander attention when asked questions like "Who do you think is smarter?" but overimitated both adults' unnecessary actions equally. Although older children overimitated more, unselectivity was consistent across ages. This pattern hints at a plausible adaptive function of overimitation: acquiring rarely demonstrated behaviors by practising them immediately.
Research indicates that in experimental settings, young children of 3-7 years old are unlikely to devise a simple tool to solve a problem. This series of exploratory studies done in museums in the US and UK explores how environment and ownership of materials may improve children’s ability and inclination for (i) tool material selection and (ii) innovation. The first study takes place in a children’s museum, an environment where children can use tools and materials freely. We replicated a tool innovation task in this environment and found that while 3-4 year olds showed the predicted low levels of innovation rates, 4-7 year olds showed higher rates of innovation than the younger children and than reported in prior studies. The second study explores the effect of whether the experimental materials are owned by the experimenter or the child on tool selection and innovation. Results showed that 5-6 year olds and 6-7 year olds were more likely to select tool material they owned compared to tool material owned by the experimenter, although ownership had no effect on tool innovation. We argue that learning environments supporting tool exploration and invention and conveying ownership over materials may encourage successful tool innovation at earlier ages. © 2016 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
Young children can use cues that an adult is pedagogically providing information for their benefit to evaluate its importance and generalizability. But to use pedagogical actions to guide learning, children must learn to navigate ongoing pedagogical interactions, identifying which specific actions within an overarching context are in fact meant as pedagogical. In two experiments (N = 120) we illustrate that 3-year-old struggle with this ability, failing to distinguish pedagogical from merely intentional actions unless the endpoints of a pedagogical interaction were clearly demarked. These results shed light on the development of this powerful learning mechanism for facilitating inductive inference.
This chapter examines children' attention to surrounding events in which they are not directly involved, a way of learning that fits with the cultural approach of Learning by Observing and Pitching In. Research in instructional settings has found that attention to surrounding events is more common among Indigenous Guatemalan Mayan and some US Mexican-heritage children than among middle-class children from several ethnic backgrounds. We examine this phenomenon in a quasi-naturalistic setting to see if the cultural variation in young children's attention to surrounding events in which they were not directly involved extends beyond instructional settings. During a home visit focused on their younger sibling, 19 Guatemalan Mayan and 18 middle-class European American 3- to 5-year olds were nearby but not addressed, as their mother helped their toddler sibling operate novel objects. The Guatemalan Mayan children more frequently attended to this nearby interaction and other third-party activities, whereas the middle-class European American children more often attended to their own activities in which they were directly involved or they fussed or showed off. The results support the idea that in some Indigenous communities of the Americas where young children are included in a broad range of family and community endeavors, children may be especially inclined to attend to ongoing events, even if they are not directly involved or addressed, compared to European American children whose families have extensive experience in Western school ways.
In the 7 million years or so since humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees we have colonized more of the planet's terrestrial habitat than any other mammalian species and come to account for more biomass than all other terrestrial vertebrates combined. Chimpanzees, in contrast to and under pressure from ourselves, have veered toward extinction. There are multiple reasons for the stark evolutionary trajectories humans and chimpanzees have taken. Recent theoretical and empirical interest has focused on the emergence of cumulative culture whereby technological innovations are progressively incorporated into a population's stock of skills and knowledge, generating ever more sophisticated repertoires. Here we look at the role of high-fidelity imitation and intention-reading in the establishment of cumulative culture. By focusing on the lithic record, we aim to identify when in our evolutionary history these skills became part of our ancestors' behavioral repertoire. We argue that evidence of cooperative construction in stone tool manufacture, along with speculation regarding changes to the mirror neurone system, hint at the foundations of overimitation and shared intentionality around 2 million years ago. However, these are not the only ingredients of cumulative culture, which is why we do not see convincing evidence for it until slightly more than a million years later.
Young children understand pedagogical demonstrations as conveying generic, kind-relevant information. But, in some contexts, they also see almost any confident, intentional action on a novel artefact as normative and thus generic, regardless of whether this action was pedagogically demonstrated for them. Thus, although pedagogy may not be necessary for inferences to the generic, it may nevertheless be sufficient to produce inductive inferences on which the child relies more strongly. This study addresses this tension by bridging the literature on normative reasoning with that on social learning and inductive inference. Three-year-old children learned about a novel artefact from either a pedagogical or non-pedagogical demonstration, and then, a series of new actors acted on that artefact in novel ways. Although children protested normatively in both conditions (e.g., 'No, not like that'), they persisted longer in enforcing the learned norms in the face of repeated non-conformity by the new actors. This finding suggests that not all generic, normative inferences are created equal, but rather they depend - at least for their strength - on the nature of the acquisition process.
© 2015 The British Psychological Society.
Studies on the neural bases of action perception have largely focused on the perception of individual actions. Little is known about perception of joint actions where two or more individuals coordinate their actions based on a shared intention. In this fMRI study we asked whether observing situations where two individuals act on a shared intention elicits a different neural response than observing situations where individuals act on their independent parallel intentions. We compared the neural response to perceptually identical yet intentionally ambiguous actions observed in varying contexts. A dialog between two individuals conveyed either a shared intention or two independent parallel intentions. The dialogs were followed by an identical video clip where the two individuals performed certain actions. In one task condition participants tracked the intentions of the actors, in the other, they monitored moving colored dots placed on the same videos. We found that in the intention task versus the color task, observing joint actions based on shared intentions activated the temporal poles, precuneus, and the ventral striatum compared to observing interactions based on parallel intentions. Precuneus and the temporal poles are thought to support mental state reasoning, the latter with a more specific role in retrieving memories associated with social scripts. Activation in the ventral striatum, an area involved in reward processing, likely indicates a hedonistic response to observed shared intentional relations similarly to those experienced when personally sharing mental states with others.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Building on recent efforts to reconceptualize development and socialization as contextually grounded processes, several aspects of Yucatec Mayan children's daily lives are observed, including maintenance activities, social orientation, work, and play. For each category of activity, the behavior of children ranging in age from 0 to 17 is described. Three principles of engagement generated to explain the Mayan cultural context (primacy of adult work, parental beliefs, and independence of child motivation) are used to interpret the descriptive data, illustrating how cultural understanding enables a meaningful interpretation of Mayan children's behavior and how lack of knowledge of these principles could lead to a misinterpretation through a Western cultural lens.
Abstract All four species of great apes and young human children (12–24 mo of age) were administered an imitation task designed to distinguish between results learning (emulation) and action learning (imitation). Some subjects were exposed to a demonstrator either pushing or pulling a door to open a box, whereas others simply saw the door of the box opening itself in one of the two directions (the ghost control). Most of the apes successfully opened the box in both experimental conditions, as well as in a baseline condition, but without being influenced either by the demonstrator's actions or by the door's motions. In contrast, human children over 12 mo of age were influenced by the demonstration: the 18-mo-olds were influenced by the demonstrator's actions, and the 24-mo-olds were influenced both by the demonstrator's actions and by the door's motions in the ghost control. These results provide support for the hypothesis that human children have a greater propensity than great apes for focusing either on a demonstrator's action or on the result of their action, as needed, in social learning situations.
Object use is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human species, and learning how objects function is a fundamental part of development. In this article the authors examine the role that intentionality plays in children's understanding of causal relationships during observational learning of object use. Children observed demonstrations in which causally irrelevant and causally relevant actions were performed to achieve a desired goal. The intentionality of these actions was manipulated using verbal markers. Irrelevant actions were performed either intentionally (“There!”) or accidentally (“Whoops! I didn't mean to do that!”). Three-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, but not 2-year-olds, were less likely to imitate causally irrelevant actions performed accidentally than when they were performed intentionally. This suggests that older children used intentionality to guide causal inference and perceived intentional actions as causally effective and accidental actions as causally ineffective. Findings are discussed from an evolutionary perspective in relation to the cultural transmission of tool-use knowledge.
Investigated whether children would re-enact what an adult actually did or what the adult intended to do. In Experiment, 1 children were shown an adult who tried, but failed, to perform certain target acts. Completed target acts were thus not observed. Children in comparison groups either saw the full target act or appropriate controls. Results showed that children could infer the adult's intended act by watching the failed attempts. Experiment 2 tested children's understanding of an inanimate object that traced the same movements as the person had followed. Children showed a completely different reaction to the mechanical device than to the person: They did not produce the target acts in this case. Eighteen-mo-olds situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. They have already adopted a fundamental aspect of folk psychology—persons (but not inanimate objects) are understood within a framework involving goals and intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study used a diffusion chain paradigm to explore the cultural transmission of causally irrelevant tool actions in chains of adult participants. Each chain witnessed an "expert" adult retrieve a reward from inside a puzzle box using a combination of causally relevant actions and causally irrelevant actions. Which of the actions were causally relevant was evident in two of the chains where a transparent box was used. In the other two chains, the causal effectiveness of the tool was hidden inside an opaque version of the box. Results indicated that fewer of the irrelevant actions performed by the expert model were reproduced in the transparent box chains, than the opaque box chains. However, irrelevant actions, although not in their original form, were evident within each chain suggesting that causally irrelevant tool actions can survive within groups of adults. The current article places these results, alongside those from earlier overimitation studies, within a framework of cultural evolution. The proposal here is that the social learning of irrelevant actions is heavily influenced by the interaction between various transmission biases, including frequency-based biases, model-based biases, and content-based biases. It is further proposed that the transmission bias witnessed may differ according to the interplay between characteristics of the model, characteristics of the observer, and the contents of the task.
There is much controversy over what is needed for culture to flourish and what has led human culture to be different from "cultural" characteristics of other animals. Here I argue that the emergence of childhood as a step in the life cycle was critical to the evolution of the human cultural mind. My line of reasoning is built around two complementary features of childhood: imitation and play. When children imitate adults they routinely copy unnecessary and arbitrary actions. They will persistently replicate how an object is used, even when doing so interferes with their ability to produce the very outcome those actions are intended to bring about. Though seemingly maladaptive, this behavior provides for the faithful transmission of cultural ideas across generations. When children play together they commonly construct rules and meanings that exist purely because the players agree they "exist." Play thus provides the building blocks with which children rehearse the kinds of institutional realities that typify cultural practices. I argue that these forms of imitation and play represent a foundation upon which human culture flourished and that neither are prevalent in nonhuman animals. In light of these arguments evidence will be assessed suggesting that childhood emerged relatively late in human evolution.
Many previous accounts of imitation have pointed out that children's copying behavior is a means by which to learn from others, while virtually ignoring the social factors which influence imitation. These accounts have thus far been unable to explain flexibility in children's copying behavior (e.g., why children sometimes copy exactly and sometimes copy selectively). We propose that the complexity of children's imitation can only be fully understood by considering the social context in which it is produced. Three critical factors in determining what is copied are children's own (learning and/or social) goals in the situation, children's identification with the model and with the social group in general, and the social pressures which children experience within the imitative situation. The specific combination of these factors which is present during the imitative interaction can lead children to produce a more or less faithful reproduction of the model's act. Beyond explaining flexibility in children's copying behavior, this approach situates the developmental study of imitation within a broader social psychological framework, linking it conceptually with closely related topics such as mimicry, conformity, normativity, and the cultural transmission of group differences.
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.
Children are generally masterful imitators, both rational and flexible in their reproduction of others' actions. After observing an adult operating an unfamiliar object, however, young children will frequently overimitate, reproducing not only the actions that were causally necessary but also those that were clearly superfluous. Why does overimitation occur? We argue that when children observe an adult intentionally acting on a novel object, they may automatically encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful. This process of automatic causal encoding (ACE) would generally guide children to accurate beliefs about even highly opaque objects. In situations where some of an adult's intentional actions were unnecessary, however, it would also lead to persistent overimitation. Here, we undertake a thorough examination of the ACE hypothesis, reviewing prior evidence and offering three new experiments to further test the theory. We show that children will persist in overimitating even when doing so is costly (underscoring the involuntary nature of the effect), but also that the effect is constrained by intentionality in a manner consistent with its posited learning function. Overimitation may illuminate not only the structure of children's causal understanding, but also the social learning processes that support our species' artefact-centric culture.
More studies have focused on aspects of chimpanzee behaviour and cognition relevant to the evolution of culture than on any other species except our own. Accordingly, analysis of the features shared by chimpanzees and humans is here used to infer the scope of cultural phenomena in our last common ancestor, at the same time clarifying the nature of the special characteristics that advanced further in the hominin line. To do this, culture is broken down into three major aspects: the large scale, population-level patterning of traditions; social learning mechanisms; and the behavioural and cognitive contents of culture. Each of these is further dissected into subcomponents. Shared features, as well as differences, are identified in as many as a dozen of these, offering a case study for the comparative analysis of culture across animal taxa and a deeper understanding of the roots of our own cultural capacities.
In over-imitation, children copy even elements of a goal-directed action sequence that appear unnecessary for achieving the goal. We demonstrate in 4-year olds that the unnecessary action is specifically associated with the goal, not generally associated with the apparatus. The unnecessary action is performed flexibly: 4-year olds usually omit it if it has already been performed by an adult. Most 5-year olds do not verbally report the unnecessary action as necessary when achieving the goal, although most of them report an equivalent but necessary action as necessary. Most 5-year olds explain the necessary action in functional terms, but are unsure as to the function of the unnecessary action. These verbal measures do not support the hypothesis that children over-imitate primarily because they encode unnecessary actions as causing the goal even in causally transparent systems. In a causally transparent system, explanations for over-imitation fitting the results are that children are ignorant of the unnecessary action's purpose, and that they learn a prescriptive norm that it should be carried out. In causally opaque systems, however, for children and for adults, any action performed before achieving the goal is likely to be inferred as causally necessary-this is not over-imitation, but ordinary causal learning.
Children are surrounded by objects that they must learn to use. One of the most efficient ways children do this is by imitation. Recent work has shown that, in contrast to nonhuman primates, human children focus more on reproducing the specific actions used than on achieving actual outcomes when learning by imitating. From 18 months of age, children will routinely copy even arbitrary and unnecessary actions. This puzzling behavior is called overimitation. By documenting similarities exhibited by children from a large, industrialized city and children from remote Bushman communities in southern Africa, we provide here the first indication that overimitation may be a universal human trait. We also show that overimitation is unaffected by the age of the child, differences in the testing environment, or familiarity with the demonstrating adult. Furthermore, we argue that, although seemingly maladaptive, overimitation reflects an evolutionary adaptation that is fundamental to the development and transmission of human culture.
We describe our recent studies of imitation and cultural transmission in chimpanzees and children, which question late twentieth-century characterizations of children as imitators, but chimpanzees as emulators. As emulation entails learning only about the results of others' actions, it has been thought to curtail any capacity to sustain cultures. Recent chimpanzee diffusion experiments have by contrast documented a significant capacity for copying local behavioural traditions. Additionally, in recent 'ghost' experiments with no model visible, chimpanzees failed to replicate the object movements on which emulation is supposed to focus. We conclude that chimpanzees rely more on imitation and have greater cultural capacities than previously acknowledged. However, we also find that they selectively apply a range of social learning processes that include emulation. Recent studies demonstrating surprisingly unselective 'over-imitation' in children suggest that children's propensity to imitate has been underestimated too. We discuss the implications of these developments for the nature of social learning and culture in the two species. Finally, our new experiments directly address cumulative cultural learning. Initial results demonstrate a relative conservatism and conformity in chimpanzees' learning, contrasting with cumulative cultural learning in young children. This difference may contribute much to the contrast in these species' capacities for cultural evolution.
Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species' existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the 'zone of latent solutions') that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the 'ratchet effect'). This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans' unique form of cumulative cultural evolution.
This study investigated differences in attention and learning among Guatemalan Mayan and European American children, ages 5-11 years, who were present but not addressed while their sibling was shown how to construct a novel toy. Each child waited with a distracter toy for her or his turn to make a different toy. Nonaddressed children from Mayan traditional families (with little maternal involvement in Western schooling; n = 40) showed more sustained attention and learning than their counterparts from Mayan families with extensive involvement in Western schooling (n = 40) or European American children (with extensive family involvement in schooling; n = 40). The nonaddressed Mayan children from highly schooled families in turn attended more than the European American children. These findings are consistent with research showing that traditional indigenous ways of organizing learning emphasize observation of ongoing interactions.
We propose that human communication is specifically adapted to allow the transmission of generic knowledge between individuals. Such a communication system, which we call 'natural pedagogy', enables fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone. We argue that human infants are prepared to be at the receptive side of natural pedagogy (i) by being sensitive to ostensive signals that indicate that they are being addressed by communication, (ii) by developing referential expectations in ostensive contexts and (iii) by being biased to interpret ostensive-referential communication as conveying information that is kind-relevant and generalizable.
The primary goal of this study was to investigate cultural transmission in young children, with specific reference to the phenomenon of overimitation. Diffusion chains were used to compare the imitation of 2- and 3-year-olds on a task in which the initial child in each chain performed a series of relevant and irrelevant actions on a puzzle box in order to retrieve a reward. Children in the chains witnessed the actions performed on one of two boxes, one which was transparent and so the lack of causality of the irrelevant actions was obvious, while the other was opaque and so the lack of causal relevance was not obvious. Unlike previous dyadic research in which children overimitate a model, the irrelevant actions were parsed out early in the diffusion chains. Even though children parsed out irrelevant actions, they showed fidelity to the method used to perform a relevant action both within dyads and across groups. This was true of 3-year-olds, and also 2-year-olds, therefore extending findings from previous research.
Common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 2-year-old human children (Homo sapiens) were presented with a rakelike tool and a desirable but out-of-reach object. One group of subjects observed a human demonstrator use the tool in one way, and another group observed a demonstrator use the tool in another way. Children in both cases did what the model did. Chimpanzee subjects, however, behaved identically in the 2 model conditions. Both groups performed better than subjects who saw no demonstration. This pattern of results suggest that the chimpanzees were paying attention to the general functional relations in the task and to the results obtained by the demonstrator but not to the actual methods of tool use demonstrated. Human children were focused on the demonstrator's actual methods of tool use (her behavior). The different social learning processes used by the 2 species have implications for their different forms of social organization.
As an increasing number of field studies of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have achieved long-term status across Africa, differences in the behavioural repertoires described have become apparent that suggest there is significant cultural variation. Here we present a systematic synthesis of this information from the seven most long-term studies, which together have accumulated 151 years of chimpanzee observation. This comprehensive analysis reveals patterns of variation that are far more extensive than have previously been documented for any animal species except humans. We find that 39 different behaviour patterns, including tool usage, grooming and courtship behaviours, are customary or habitual in some communities but are absent in others where ecological explanations have been discounted. Among mammalian and avian species, cultural variation has previously been identified only for single behaviour patterns, such as the local dialects of song-birds. The extensive, multiple variations now documented for chimpanzees are thus without parallel. Moreover, the combined repertoire of these behaviour patterns in each chimpanzee community is itself highly distinctive, a phenomenon characteristic of human cultures but previously unrecognised in non-human species.
The present work documents how the logic of a model's demonstration and the communicative cues that the model provides interact with age to influence how children engage in social learning. Children at ages 12, 18, and 24 months (n=204) watched a model open a series of boxes. Twelve-month-old subjects only copied the specific actions of the model when they were given a logical reason to do so--otherwise, they focused on reproducing the outcome of the demonstrated actions. Eighteen-month-old subjects focused on copying the outcome when the model was aloof. When the model acted socially, the subjects were as likely to focus on copying actions as outcomes, irrespective of the apparent logic of the model's behavior. Finally, 24-month-old subjects predominantly focused on copying the model's specific actions. However, they were less likely to produce the modeled outcome when the model acted non-socially.
Young children are surprisingly judicious imitators, but there are also times when their reproduction of others' actions appears strikingly illogical. For example, children who observe an adult inefficiently operating a novel object frequently engage in what we term overimitation, persistently reproducing the adult's unnecessary actions. Although children readily overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees ignore, this curious effect has previously attracted little interest; it has been assumed that children overimitate not for theoretically significant reasons, but rather as a purely social exercise. In this paper, however, we challenge this view, presenting evidence that overimitation reflects a more fundamental cognitive process. We show that 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, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly. This automatic causal encoding process allows children to rapidly calibrate their causal beliefs about even the most opaque physical systems, but it also carries a cost. When some of the adult's purposeful actions are unnecessary—even transparently so—children are highly prone to mis-encoding them as causally significant. The resulting distortions in children's causal beliefs are the true cause of overimitation, a fact that makes the effect remarkably resistant to extinction. Despite countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings, children are frequently unable to avoid reproducing the adult's irrelevant actions because they have already incorporated them into their representation of the target object's causal structure.
• causal learning
• cognitive development
• imitation
Estudio sobre el desarrollo de los seres humanos, visto como procesos culturales que ocurren a través de la participación del sujeto, junto a otros miembros de su comunidad, en la construcción y reconstrucción de prácticas culturales que han sido heredadas de generaciones anteriores. Temas clásicos del desarrollo humano como la crianza, la interdependencia y la autonomía, las transiciones a lo largo del ciclo vital, el desarrollo cognoscitivo, el aprendizaje, los roles de género o las relaciones sociales son examinados desde una perspectiva cultural, que reúne ideas de la psicología evolutiva, la antropología, la educación y la historia.
Previous research has shown that children as young as 2 can learn words from 3rd-party conversations (Akhtar, Jipson, & Callanan, 2001). The focus of this study was to determine whether younger infants could learn a new word through overhearing. Novel object labels were introduced to 18-month-old infants in 1 of 2 conditions: directly by an experimenter or in the context of overhearing the experimenter use the word while interacting with another adult. The findings suggest that, when memory demands are not too high, 18-month-old infants can learn words through overhearing.
We used the diffusion chain method in order to investigate whether irrelevant actions would be transmitted along chains of 3- and 5-year-old children. Four chains of eight children witnessed a trained “expert” child perform a sequence of actions in order to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or an opaque puzzle box. The action sequence involved both goal relevant and goal irrelevant actions. In the transparent box chains the participants could potentially determine which of the actions were irrelevant as the causal effects were clearly visible. Results indicated that irrelevant actions transmitted down chains of 3-year-old children irrespective of box transparency. In contrast, irrelevant actions dropped out of the transparent box chain extremely quickly at 5 years, but were maintained within the opaque chain. These findings highlight the power of the diffusion chain method as a tool for exploring cultural learning.
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Studies comparing adult and peer imitation are rare and have to date provided mixed results. The aim of the present study was to investigate 14-month-olds' imitation of different actions (novel versus familiar) performed by televised models of different age groups (peers, older children or adults). In two experiments, we investigated infants' imitative performance when observing a novel action (Experiment 1) and familiar actions (Experiment 2). The results showed that the likelihood of imitating a novel action increased as the age of the model increased. The opposite was true for familiar actions where infants imitated the peer more frequently than either the older child or the adult model. These findings are discussed in relation to infants' ability to take into account a model's characteristics such as age when imitating actions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This experiment tested how 18-month-old infants’ prior experience with an object affects their imitation. Specifically, we asked whether infants would imitate an adult who used her head to illuminate a light-box if they had earlier discovered that the light could be illuminated with their hands. In the Self-Discovery condition, infants had the opportunity to freely explore the light-box; all infants used their hands to activate the light-box at least once during this period. The experimenter then entered the room and, while providing explicit pedagogical cues, demonstrated illuminating the light-box using her forehead. In the Demonstration Only condition, infants just viewed the experimenter’s demonstration. During a subsequent testing phase, infants in the Demonstration Only condition were more likely to use their foreheads to activate the light-box. Conversely, infants in the Self-Discovery condition were more likely to use their hands, suggesting that efficiency can “trump” pedagogy in some observational learning contexts.
Young children's ability to learn something new from a third-party interaction may be related to the ability to imagine themselves in the third-party interaction. This imaginative ability presupposes an understanding of self-other equivalence, which is manifested in an objective understanding of the self and an understanding of others' subjective perspectives. The current study measured imitative learning of a novel action seen only in a third-party interaction, mirror self-recognition, and perspective taking in a group of 48 18- to 20-month-olds. Patterns of performance suggest that understanding self-other equivalence is related to third-party learning.
In previous studies, very young children have learned words while "overhearing" a conversation, yet they have had trouble learning words from a person on video. In Study 1, 64 toddlers (mean age=29.8 months) viewed an object-labeling demonstration in 1 of 4 conditions. In 2, the speaker (present or on video) directly addressed the child, and in 2, the speaker addressed another adult who was present or was with her on video. Study 2 involved 2 follow-up conditions with 32 toddlers (mean age=30.4 months). Across the 2 studies, the results indicated that toddlers learned words best when participating in or observing a reciprocal social interaction with a speaker who was present or on video.
Typically developing children have been shown to imitate the specific means used by an adult to achieve an object-directed outcome, even if a more efficient method is available. It has been argued that this behaviour can be attributed to social and communicative motivations. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), relative to children with Down syndrome (DS), show a reduced tendency to copy the exact means used by an adult to produce a novel outcome. To achieve this a sample of 34 children (22 with ASD and 12 with DS) were given a test of object-directed imitation. Contrary to expectation, children in both groups imitated the specific method of the model to the same high extent. This finding is in line with suggestions that object-directed imitation is relatively spared in children with autism but is surprising given arguments linking such imitation to socially based motivations. Nevertheless, children's ability to successfully copy the model was associated with their communicative ability, providing some support for the link between imitation and communication. The Australian Psychological Society Ltd.
Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated demonstrations, and they might also use information about the actor's knowledge state and pedagogical intentions. We define a Bayesian model that predicts children will decide whether to imitate part or all of an action sequence based on both the pattern of statistical evidence and the demonstrator's pedagogical stance. To test this prediction, we conducted an experiment in which preschool children watched an experimenter repeatedly perform sequences of varying actions followed by an outcome. Children's imitation of sequences that produced the outcome increased, in some cases resulting in production of shorter sequences of actions that the children had never seen performed in isolation. A second experiment established that children interpret the same statistical evidence differently when it comes from a knowledgeable teacher versus a naïve demonstrator. In particular, in the pedagogical case children are more likely to "overimitate" by reproducing the entire demonstrated sequence. This behavior is consistent with our model's predictions, and suggests that children attend to both statistical and pedagogical evidence in deciding which actions to imitate, rather than obligately imitating successful action sequences.
Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrelevant actions, a phenomenon dubbed 'over-imitation'. To investigate whether children develop beyond this, we allowed both adults and children to witness either a child or adult model performing goal-relevant and goal-irrelevant actions to extract a reward from a transparent puzzle box. Surprisingly, copying of irrelevant actions increased with age, with the adults performing the task with less efficiency than the children. Participants of all ages were more likely to perform the irrelevant actions performed by an adult model, than by a child model. These results suggest that people may become more imitative as they mature, whilst selectively copying particular models with a high level of fidelity. We suggest that this combination of faithful copying and selectivity underwrites the powerful social learning necessary for the level of cultural transmission on which our species depends.
Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children's exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naïve adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in the pedagogical condition focused almost exclusively on the target function; by contrast, children in the other conditions explored broadly. In Experiment 2, we show that children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action. We discuss these findings as the result of rational inductive biases. In pedagogical contexts, a teacher's failure to provide evidence for additional functions provides evidence for their absence; such contexts generalize from child to child (because children are likely to have comparable states of knowledge) but not from adult to child. Thus, pedagogy promotes efficient learning but at a cost: children are less likely to perform potentially irrelevant actions but also less likely to discover novel information.
Through the second year, children’s copying behaviour shifts from a focus on emulating to a focus on imitating. This shift can be explained by a change in focus from copying others to satisfy cognitive motivations to copying in order to satisfy social motivations. As elegant and detailed as the shared circuits model (SCM) is, it misses this crucial, motivation-based feature of imitation.
An imitation procedure was used to investigate the impact of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant learning from television. Eighteen-month-old infants watched two pre-recorded videos showing an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions with two sets of stimuli. Infants' familiarity with the demonstrator and the language used during the demonstration varied as a function of experimental condition. Immediately after watching each video, infants' ability to reproduce the target actions was assessed. A highly familiar demonstrator did not enhance infants' performance. However, the addition of a narrative, developed from mothers' naturalistic description of the event, facilitated learning from an unfamiliar demonstrator. We propose that the differential effect of demonstrator familiarity and language cues may reflect the infants' ability to distinguish between important and less important aspects in a learning situation.
We explored whether a rising trend to blindly "overcopy" a model's causally irrelevant actions between 3 and 5 years of age, found in previous studies, predicts a more circumspect disposition in much younger children. Children between 23 and 30 months of age observed a model use a tool to retrieve a reward from either a transparent or opaque puzzle box. Some of the tool actions were irrelevant to reward retrieval, whereas others were causally necessary. The causal relevance of the tool actions was highly visible in the transparent box condition, allowing the participants to potentially discriminate which actions were necessary. In contrast, the causal efficacy of the tool was hidden in the opaque box condition. When both the 23- and 30-month-olds were presented with either the transparent or opaque box, they were most commonly emulative rather than imitative, performing only the causally necessary actions. This strategy contrasts with the blanket imitation of both causally irrelevant and causally relevant actions witnessed at 3 and 5 years of age in our previous studies. The results challenge a current view of 1- and 2-year-olds as largely "blind imitators"; instead, they show that these young children have a variety of social learning processes available to them. More broadly the emerging patterns of results suggest, rather counterintuitively, that the human species becomes more imitative rather than less imitative with age, in some ways "mindlessly" so.
To date, developmental research has rarely addressed the notion that imitation serves an interpersonal, socially based function. The present research thus examined the role of social engagement on 24-month-olds' imitation by manipulating the social availability of the model. In Experiment 1, the children were more likely to imitate the exact actions of a live socially responsive model compared to a videotaped model who could not provide socially contingent feedback. In Experiment 2, the children were more likely to imitate the exact actions of a model with whom they could communicate via a closed-circuit TV system than a videotaped model who could not provide interactive feedback. This research provides clear evidence that children's imitative behavior is affected by the social nature of the model. These findings are discussed in relation to theories on imitation and the video deficit.
Recent research indicates that toddlers can monitor others' conversations, raising the possibility that they can acquire vocabulary in this way. Three studies examined 2-year-olds' (N = 88) ability to learn novel words when overhearing these words used by others. Children aged 2,6 were equally good at learning novel words-both object labels and action verbs-when they were overhearers as when they were directly addressed. For younger 2-year-olds (2,1), this was true for object labels, but the results were less clear for verbs. The findings demonstrate that 2-year-olds can acquire novel words from overheard speech, and highlight the active role played by toddlers in vocabulary acquisition.
This study explored whether the tendency of chimpanzees and children to use emulation or imitation to solve a tool-using task was a response to the availability of causal information. Young wild-born chimpanzees from an African sanctuary and 3- to 4-year-old children observed a human demonstrator use a tool to retrieve a reward from a puzzle-box. The demonstration involved both causally relevant and irrelevant actions, and the box was presented in each of two conditions: opaque and clear. In the opaque condition, causal information about the effect of the tool inside the box was not available, and hence it was impossible to differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant parts of the demonstration. However, in the clear condition causal information was available, and subjects could potentially determine which actions were necessary. When chimpanzees were presented with the opaque box, they reproduced both the relevant and irrelevant actions, thus imitating the overall structure of the task. When the box was presented in the clear condition they instead ignored the irrelevant actions in favour of a more efficient, emulative technique. These results suggest that emulation is the favoured strategy of chimpanzees when sufficient causal information is available. However, if such information is not available, chimpanzees are prone to employ a more comprehensive copy of an observed action. In contrast to the chimpanzees, children employed imitation to solve the task in both conditions, at the expense of efficiency. We suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions, perhaps combined with a differential focus on the results, actions and goals of the demonstrator.
Two studies examined the robustness of vocabulary learning through overhearing by testing 48 2-year-olds in contexts in which a potentially distracting activity was present (Studies 1 and 2) and in which the novel word was embedded in a directive rather than a labeling statement (Study 2). The children were equally good at learning a novel object label when there was no distracting activity as when there was. They were also able to learn the word when the object was not explicitly labeled. These findings suggest that young children are keen observers of third-party interactions and that their linguistic input consists of more than just speech directly addressed to them.
Humans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast-learn the contents of such teaching through a human-specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye-contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of 'motherese', and being addressed by one's own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such 'ostensive' cues that signal the teacher's communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others' object-directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person's mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14-month-olds' interpretation of others' object-directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far-reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social-cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.
Playing games, particularly pretense games, is one of the areas where young children first enter into collective, conventional practices. This chapter reviews recent empirical data in support of this claim and explores the idea that games present a cradle for children's growing into societal and institutional life more generally.
The cultural nature of human development The construction of social reality
- B Rogoff
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