Using Your Head: Measuring Infants' Rational Imitation of Actions

Overview

Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles—University of Louisville

One of the main challenges of infancy is to learn how to achieve one’s goals in the world, whether they are to pick up a toy or to express desires to another person, and one of the most powerful tools in this learning process is imitation. However, imitation is not always as simple as copying other people’s actions; it is also necessary to realize that goals and intentions guide behavior. The world is a complicated place, and the actions that babies imitate are not perfectly presented. For example, consider a baby watching their father drinking from a plastic water bottle. As he picks up the bottle, he accidentally drops it on the floor. He picks it up and dusts it off, before turning the cap and taking a drink. If the baby wants to drink from the bottle on their own, they have to decode this complex set of events and determine which actions are related to their goal. Do they have to drop it and dust it off, or can they simply turn the cap and take a drink?

One way to solve this problem is to view many examples of the same behavior, but some behaviors are rare or different each time they are performed. Thus, it is beneficial for infants to think more about the person they are imitating and less about the specific situation they are observing. If infants assume that others are rational and have goals they are efficiently pursuing, then they can observe a complex event and separate the goal-oriented actions from actions that are incidental or unrelated to their goals. Analyzing the reasons underlying a person’s behavior allows infants to decide whether it makes sense to imitate that person’s exact actions or to do things in a simpler or more effective way.

This experiment demonstrates how to measure infant’s rational imitation of an actor using the methods developed by Meltzoff¹ and Gergely, Bekkering, and Kiraly.²

Procedure

Recruit a number of 14-month-old infants. Participants should have no history of developmental disorders and have normal hearing and vision.

Because infants of this age can be uncooperative or fussy (e.g., refuse to watch a demonstration) and this experiment requires two sessions, expect to recruit and test extra participants in order to obtain sufficient data.

1. Data collection

Session one
1. Place a touch-sensitive lamp (at least 6 in

Results

Researchers tested 27 infants and found that 69% of the infants in the hands-free condition re-enacted the head action during session two. In contrast, only 21% of the infants in the hands-occupied condition did so (Figure 1). This supports the claim that 14-month-olds are able to evaluate the reasons for an adult’s behavior. When they viewed the experimenter touching the lamp with their head while their hands were occupied, they inferred that they would have used their hands if they were free, and

Application and Summary

Imitation is crucial for learning about a wide range of human behaviors, ranging from language to tool use. However, the ability to rationally imitate actions shows that even infants do not simply copy what they see other people do. Instead, by age 1, children are already thinking about the reasons for a person’s behavior and using that to guide their own behaviors—even if a long time has passed since they first observed the person’s behavior.

Rational imitation can be applie

References

Meltzoff, A. N. Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: Long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Developmental Psychology. 24 (4), 470 (1988).
Gergely, G., Bekkering, H., & Király, I. Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Nature. 415 (6873), 755-755 (2002).