1,721,004 research outputs found
"Over-imitation": A review and appraisal of a decade of research
Full text linkAfter 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
Fourteen-month-olds adapt their imitative behavior in light of a model’s constraints
Full text linkRather than reenacting every action they observe, preverbal infants adapt their imitative behavior. Although previous studies have revealed the capability of preverbal infants to imitate selectively, the question about the adaptability of this behavior on an individual level did not attract considerable scientific attention until now. In the current study, we investigated whether 14-month-old infants flexibly alternate their imitative response in accordance with a model’s changing physical constraints in a body-part imitation paradigm. Participants were presented with two novel actions whereby a model illuminated a light-box and turned on a sound-box, either by using her forehead (head touch) or by sitting on the apparatus (sit-touch). Each participant observed these tasks in two conditions: once where the model’s hands were occupied and once where her hands were free while executing the head or sit-touch. Participants were more likely to reenact the observed novel behavior when the model had freely chosen to perform it than when she had to do so due to physical constraints. Not only did we replicate a number of previous findings, we show here that preverbal infants adapt their imitative behavior across conditions based on the physical constraints of the model. These results point towards the adaptable nature of imitative behavior also on an individual level. This ability might be one of the building blocks for children for learning their social group’s specific action repertoire
The influence of a bystander agent's beliefs on children's and adults' decision-making process
No full textThe ability to attribute and represent others’ mental states (e.g., beliefs; so-called ‘‘theory of mind”) is essential for participation in human social interaction. Despite a considerable body of research using tasks in which protagonists in the participants’ attentional focus held false or true beliefs, the question of automatic belief attri- bution to bystander agents has received little attention. In the current study, we presented adults and 6-year-olds (N= 92) with an implicit computer-based avoidance false-belief task in which participants were asked to place an object into one of three boxes. While doing so, we manipulated the beliefs of an irrelevant human-like or non-human-like bystander agent who was visible on the screen. Importantly, the bystander agent’s beliefs were irrelevant for solving the task. Still, children’s decision making was significantly influenced by the bystander agent’s beliefs even if this was a non-human-like self-propelled object. Such an influence did not become obvious in adults’ deliberate decisions but occurred only in their reaction times, which suggests that they also processed the bystander agent’s beliefs but were able to suppress the influence of such beliefs on their behavior regulation. The results of a control study (N= 53) ruled out low-level explanations and confirmed that self-propelledness of agents is a necessary factor for belief attribution to occur. Thus, not only do humans spontaneously ascribe beliefs to self-propelled bystander agents, but those beliefs even influence meaningful decisions in children
Rational imitation declines within the second year of life: Changes in the function of imitation
No full textCultural learning plays a crucial role in enabling children to fit into their social community by mastering culture-specific habits. Infants learn actions via imitation, and they seem to be sensitive to the context in which a model demonstrates these. They imitate rationally by copying unusual means to achieve a goal more when the model chooses this means voluntarily compared with when some constraints force the model to do so. We investigated the development of rational imitation. In a within-participants design, 18-, 24-, and 36-month-olds (N = 293) observed two unusual actions: Instead of using her hands, a model operated an apparatus by using her head or by sitting on the apparatus. The model did so once with her hands being occupied and once with her hands being free. Besides measuring participants’ imitative responses, we analyzed the gaze behavior directed at the model during the response phase of the current study and of 14-month-olds (N = 82) from Gellén and Buttelmann’s study (Child Development Research, Vol. 2017, art. 8080649 [2017]). Increasing age was accompanied by an increasing rate of overall imitation across conditions. None of the three older age groups selectively imitated the unusual actions significantly more often in the hands-free condition than in the hands-occupied condition. Thus, rational imitation seems to disappear during the second year of life. Furthermore, there was a significant increase between 14 and 24 months of age and beyond in children’s tendency to gaze at the model after reenacting the observed action. Children’s gaze behavior indicates that this pattern might be due to a growing underlying social component in early cultural learning
What Is Unique in Infant Thinking About Others? Infant Social Cognition from an Evolutionary Perspective
No full textIn search of the uniquely human in social cognition, this chapter compares empirical findings on social cognition in human infants with that of our closest genetic relatives – nonhuman great apes. In the main part of the chapter, I focus on the understanding of others’ mental states such as desires (in terms of preferences), goals, intentions, and beliefs. Grasping the content of others’ thoughts is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to predicting and explaining others’ behavior. Comparing human infants, individuals who are not yet able to produce language themselves, with great apes, that also require language-reduced tasks due to species differences in communication, seems a promising way to solve the puzzle of the phylogeny of social cognition. Due to enhanced abilities in both human and nonhuman primates, I argue that the main difference between human infants’ and great apes’ social cognition does not lie in their tracking or understanding of others’ mental states, but instead in their willingness to make use of this understanding when it comes to sharing psychological states with others. Thus, what is unique in human infants’ thinking about others might be a high degree of social motivation to put their minds together with those of the individuals around them
Calling for Careful Designs for the Evaluation of Interactive Behavioral Measures on Early False-Belief Reasoning
Full text linkWith the introduction of the interactive false-belief paradigm, Buttelmann et al.(2009) proposed that already infants track another person's beliefs in order to infer her or his goal and help accordingly. This view has been challenged by Allen (2015) who argued that is not the experimenter's mental states but the social situation the test was embedded in that influenced participants' performance
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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