Age-related Changes in Imitating Transitive and Intransitive Actions: Changes Going from Low to High Fidelity

Abstract

Imitation is an interpretative process mostly influenced by the hierarchy process. To examine the imitative hierarchy, eighty-five children aged between 3.5 to 7.5 years were asked to observe and then imitate a human adult model performing intransitive (locomotion) and transitive (with objects) action in: (1) immediate imitation, (2) short term deferred imitation and (3) long term deferred imitation. Whereas some of action sequences were necessary for achieving goals, some others were unnecessary to pursue these goals. Children’s responses were recorded, scored in dichotomous data (1-0), and then transformed in performance percentages. Results showed that: (1) for intransitive actions, all children imitated the goals in all imitation conditions. (2) For transitive actions (implying both necessary and unnecessary action sequences), there was a significant effect of age in long term deferred imitation. The 3.5 age group obtained lower scores than the other age groups for necessary sequences. For unnecessary sequences, the 3.5 and 4.5 age groups obtained lower scores than the older age groups, both in short term and long term deferred imitation conditions. The current results mostly sustain the children’s fidelity to extract the goal-critical elements and ignoring useless ones.