Abstract
Child-directed cues support imitation of novel actions at 18 months, but not at two years of age. The current studies explore the mechanisms that underlie the propensity that children have to copy others at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication changes over development. We ask if attentional allocation accounts for children's failure to imitate observed actions at 18 months, and their success at two years of age, and we explore the informational value child-directed contexts may provide across ontogeny. Eighteen-month-old (Study 1) and two-year-old (Study 2) children viewed causally non-obvious actions performed by child-directed (Study 1 & 2), observed (Study 1 & 2), or non-interactive (Study 2) actors, and their visual attention and imitative behaviors were assessed. Results demonstrated that child-directed contexts supported imitative learning for 18-month-old children, independent of their effects on proximal attention. However, by two years of age, neither directness nor communication between social partners was a necessary condition for supporting social imitation. These findings suggest that developmental changes in children's propensity to extract information from observation cannot be accounted for by changes in children's interpretation of what counts as child-directed information, and are likely not due to changes in how children allocate attention to observed events.
Highlights
Recent findings have highlighted the important role that childdirected teaching contexts play in supporting action imitation
We asked if findings that children imitate more robustly in child-directed as compared to observed situations could be wholly accounted for by differences in children’s visual attention
It is important to note that children in both the Child-directed and Observed conditions demonstrated learning from baseline to test, suggesting that while direct cuing does support young children’s ability to imitate the actions of others, it is not a necessary condition for informing this learning
Summary
Recent findings have highlighted the important role that childdirected teaching contexts play in supporting action imitation. By the time children are two years of age, child-directed interactions are no longer unique in their ability to support action imitation; two-year-olds are as likely to faithfully imitate novel actions after viewing socially aloof actors as they are after viewing actors who directly engage them [3], [4] and fouryear-old children demonstrate equal and robust imitative behaviors when directly taught, when observing a third-party interaction, and when observing a solitary actor [6]. In this paper we explore the particular properties of child-directed demonstrations that could matter for supporting action imitation at 18 months, and how the value of child-directed communication might change between 18 months and two years of age. We consider if two-year-olds’ success at learning from observation stems from an increased propensity to imitate observed actors, or from changes in children’s interpretation of what counts as being directed to them. The goal of the current studies is to investigate in greater detail why child-directed contexts matter at 18 months, and how the informational value of these contexts may change over development
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