Abstract

Children learn about the social and physical world by observing other people’s acts. This experiment tests both Chinese and American children’s learning of a rule. For theoretical reasons we chose the rule of categorizing objects by the weight. Children, age 4 years, saw an adult heft four visually-identical objects and sort them into two bins based on an invisible property—the object’s weight. Children who saw this categorization behavior were more likely to sort those objects by weight than were children who saw control actions using the same objects and the same bins. Crucially, children also generalized to a novel set of objects with no further demonstration, suggesting rule learning. We also report that high-fidelity imitation of the adult’s “hefting” acts may give children crucial experience with the objects’ weights, which could then be used to infer the more abstract rule. The connection of perception, action, and cognition was found in children from both cultures, which leads to broad implications for how the imitation of adults’ acts functions as a lever in cognitive development.

Highlights

  • The ability to learn from others’ actions sets our species apart

  • Preliminary analyses showed no significant effects of participant sex, the side on which the weights were placed, object type, or presentation order

  • Object Categorization Our first analyses test for differences in whether children sorted the sets of objects by weight as a function of experimental group

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Summary

Introduction

Human infants and toddlers have a proclivity, rare in the animal kingdom, for imitating a broad range of acts (Meltzoff et al, 2009; Whiten et al, 2009). This includes reproducing the overall outcome or endstates that others achieve with objects, and the precise means used to attain them. Reproducing others’ precise actions accelerates and supports cultural learning of instrumental actions and arbitrary rituals (Tomasello, 1999; Boyd and Richerson, 2005; Meltzoff et al, 2009; Herrmann et al, 2013). Instrumental innovations and social routines can spread through communities through imitation, thereby leading these behaviors to be maintained across generations and providing more opportunities for cumulative progress

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