Deferred Imitation in 6-Month-Old German and Cameroonian Nso Infants

Abstract

Deferred imitation is well accepted as a method to assess declarative memory in preverbal infants. Until now, mostly Western middle-class infants were tested with this paradigm. Therefore, early cultural differences in imitative behavior and/or declarative memory performance are largely unknown. This study investigated deferred imitation performance in two samples from two cultural contexts: 6-month-old Cameroonian Nso farmer infants (N = 38) and German middle-class infants (N = 46). Both samples were tested with one of two types of pillow tasks, similar to the hand puppet task: a pillow with either a White female face or a Cameroonian Nso female face. After a baseline phase, four target actions were demonstrated. Memory performance was assessed after a delay of 10 minutes. Infants’ imitative behavior was observed and compared with baseline behavior. Both the Cameroonian Nso and the German infants showed significantly more target actions in the test than in the baseline phase (memory effect). These results clearly demonstrate that imitation as a learning process in infancy is found in various cultures. Although infants of both samples showed more proximal interactions such as caressing, hugging, and kissing the pillow from their own cultural context than the one from the unfamiliar cultural context, the cultural nature of the material in memory tests did not influence memory-based performance.