Abstract
Observational learning is probably one of the most powerful factors determining progress during child development. When learning a new skill, infants rely on their own exploration; but they also frequently benefit from an adult’s verbal support or from demonstration by an adult modeling the action. At what age and under what conditions does adult demonstration really help the infant to learn a novel behavior? In this review, we summarize recently published work we have conducted on the acquisition of tool use during the second year of life. In particular, we consider under what conditions and to what extent seeing a demonstration from an adult advances an infant’s understanding of how to use a tool to obtain an out-of-reach object. Our results show that classic demonstration starts being helpful at 18 months of age. When adults explicitly show their intention prior to demonstration, even 16-month-old infants learn from the demonstration. On the other hand, providing an explicit demonstration (“look at how I do it”) is not very useful before infants are ready to succeed by themselves anyway. In contrast, repeated observations of the required action in a social context, without explicit reference to this action, considerably advances the age of success and the usefulness of providing a demonstration. We also show that the effect of demonstration can be enhanced if the demonstration makes the baby laugh. Taken together, the results from this series of studies on observational learning of tool use in infants suggest, first, that when observing a demonstration, infants do not know what to pay attention to: demonstration must be accompanied by rich social cues to be effective; second, infants’ attention is inhibited rather than enhanced by an explicit demand of “look at what I do”; and finally a humorous situation considerably helps infants understand the demonstration.
Highlights
Infants are avid explorers of the environment: their intrinsic motivation drives them to constantly look for new experiences which, in turn, increases their knowledge of the environment and allows them to display typically human behaviors such as tool use
It has been hypothesized that the “origins of tool use in humans can be found [. . .] in the Observational Learning of Tool Use perception-action routines that infants repeatedly display as they explore their environments.” (Lockman, 2000, p. 137)
Whereas some imitation can be observed from birth, for instance for mouth opening, and whereas as early as 6 months infants can repeat the manual action an adult makes in front of him, such as squeezing a duck (Abravanel et al, 1976), true observational learning appears much later, not before the second year (Meltzoff, 1988; Elsner and Aschersleben, 2003; Elsner et al, 2007; Esseily et al, 2010)
Summary
Infants are avid explorers of the environment: their intrinsic motivation drives them to constantly look for new experiences which, in turn, increases their knowledge of the environment and allows them to display typically human behaviors such as tool use. Observational Learning of Tool Use perception-action routines that infants repeatedly display as they explore their environments.” After a short reminder of what is known about observational learning during early development, the conditions leading to successful imitation, and after briefly presenting the tool-use problem and the spontaneous behavior of 12– 22 month-old infants confronted with this problem, we will review studies we have been performing in our laboratory which investigate possible reasons for the late appearance of observational learning in our tool-use task. One issue we will consider is whether it is possible to advance the age of observational learning and in which conditions of context and of demonstration
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