Motor contagion in young children: Exploring social influences on perception-action coupling

Human development occurs in a social environment in which learning is tightly coupled to the behavior of other supportive humans. One aspect of this coupling may occur through motor contagion, in which observing the actions of other people is associated with the activation of related motor representations. In order to explore the overlap between action observation and action execution in early childhood, a novel task was developed in which 4-year-old children were instructed to move a stylus on a graphics tablet in the presence of a background video which showed a model moving her arm in a direction that was either congruent or incongruent with the instructed axis of the child's stylus movements. The presence of incongruent background movements was associated with a significant interference effect on children's stylus movements. This interference effect was stronger when the background movements were performed by a same-age peer rather than by an adult. It is suggested that early childhood is a particularly interesting age period to study motor contagion, since the transition from infancy to childhood involves concurrent changes in cognitive control and in the ability to flexibly decouple perception and action. The examination of motor contagion provides an important consideration of social influences on cognitive control in early childhood--influences that have been somewhat neglected in the developmental literature on the related construct of executive functioning.