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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
Why do children overimitate? Normativity is crucial.
Stefanie Keupp1, Tanya Behne, Hannes Rakoczy
1Department of Biological Developmental Psychology, University of Göttingen, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany. stefanie.keupp@psych.uni-goettingen.de
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|August 13, 2013
Summary
Children often copy irrelevant actions, a behavior called overimitation. This study suggests children overimitate because they see these actions as part of a conventional activity, not for social affiliation or confusion.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Development
- Social Learning Theory
Background:
- Children frequently engage in overimitation, copying causally irrelevant actions within a sequence.
- Explanations include affiliation, causal confusion, and normativity accounts.
Purpose of the Study:
- To differentiate between affiliation, causal confusion, and normativity accounts of overimitation.
- To investigate how framing an action sequence (method vs. goal focus) influences children's overimitation.
Main Methods:
- Children observed a model perform actions, with the sequence framed as method-focused or goal-focused.
- Measured children's imitation, spontaneous reactions to a puppet, and explicit judgments of the puppet's behavior.
Main Results:
- Overimitation occurred frequently in both method and goal conditions.
- Children protested puppet's non-overimitation more in the method condition.
- Children judged omitting irrelevant actions as a mistake more in the method condition.
Conclusions:
- Findings support normativity accounts, suggesting children view irrelevant actions as essential to conventional activities.
- Results challenge affiliation and causal confusion explanations for overimitation.
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