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      The hidden structure of overimitation

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      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
      Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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          Abstract

          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.

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          Most cited references21

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          Understanding the Intentions of Others: Re-Enactment of Intended Acts by 18-Month-Old Children.

          Investigated was 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-month-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.
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            Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens).

            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.
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              Rational imitation in preverbal infants.

              Here we show that if an adult demonstrates a new way to execute a task to a group of infants aged 14 months, the children will use this action to achieve the same goal only if they consider it to be the most rational alternative. Our results indicate that imitation of goal-directed action by preverbal infants is a selective, interpretative process, rather than a simple re-enactment of the means used by a demonstrator, as was previously thought.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                December 11 2007
                December 11 2007
                December 04 2007
                December 11 2007
                : 104
                : 50
                : 19751-19756
                Article
                10.1073/pnas.0704452104
                2148370
                18056814
                51170ced-9377-43e7-8476-e08158cda8db
                © 2007
                History

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