In their widely noticed study, Gergely, Bekkering, and Király (2002) showed that 14-month-old infants imitated an unusual action only if the model freely chose to perform this action and not if the choice of the action could be ascribed to external constraints. They attributed this kind of selective imitation to the infants' capacity of understanding the principle of rational action. In the current paper, we present evidence that a simpler approach of perceptual distraction may be more appropriate to explain their results. When we manipulated the saliency of context stimuli in the two original conditions, the results were exactly opposite to what rational imitation predicts. Based on these findings, we reject the claim that the notion of rational action plays a key role in selective imitation in 14-month-olds.
References
[1]
Gergely G, Bekkering H, Király I (2002) Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Nature 415: 755.
[2]
Meltzoff AN (1988) Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Dev Psychol 24: 470–476.
[3]
Gergely G, Csibra G (2003) Teleological reasoning in infancy: the naive theory of rational action. Trends Cogn Sci 7: 287–292.
[4]
Blakemore SJ, Frith U (2004) How does the brain deal with the social world? Neuroreport 15: 119–128.
[5]
Keestra M (2008) The diverging force of imitation: integrating cognitive science and hermeneutics. Rev Gen Psychol 12: 127–136.
[6]
Nielsen M (2006) Copying actions and copying outcomes: social learning through the second year. Dev Psychol 42: 555–565.
[7]
Tomasello M, Haberl K (2003) Understanding attention: 12- and 18-month-olds know what is new for other persons. Dev Psychol 39: 906–912.
[8]
Williamson RA, Meltzoff AN, Markman EM (2008) Prior experiences and perceived efficacy influence 3-year-olds' imitation. Dev Psychol 44: 275–285.
[9]
Zmyj N, Daum MM, Aschersleben G (2009) The Development of Rational Imitation in 9- and 12-Month-Old Infants. Infancy 14: 131–141.
[10]
Eppler MA (1995) Development of manipulatory skills and the deployment of attention. Infant Behav Dev 18: 391–405.
[11]
Koterba EA, Iverson JM (2009) Investigating motionese: The effect of infant-directed action on infants' attention and object exploration. Infant Behav Dev 32: 437–444.
[12]
Perone S, Madole KL, Ross-Sheehy S, Carey M, Oakes LM (2008) The relation between infants' activity with objects and attention to object appearance. Dev Psychol 44: 1242–1248.
[13]
Rakison DH, Woodward AL (2008) New perspectives on the effects of action on perceptual and cognitive development. Dev Psychol 44: 1209–1213.
[14]
Wang S, Kohne L (2007) Visual experience enhances infants' use of task-relevant information in an action task. Dev Psychol 43: 1513–1522.
[15]
Horne PJ, Erjavec M, Lovett VE (2009) The effects of modelling, local stimulus enhancement, and affordance demonstration on the production of object-directed actions in 6-month-old infants. Brit J Dev Psychol 27: 269–281.
[16]
Paulus M, Hunnius S, Vissers M, Bekkering H (2011) Imitation in infancy: Rational or motor resonance? Child Dev 82: 1047–1057.
[17]
Wilson M, Knoblich G (2005) The case of motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics. Psychol Bull 131: 460–473.
[18]
Buttelmann D, Carpenter M, Call J, Tomasello M (2007) Enculturated chimpanzees imitate rationally. Dev Sci 10: F31–F38.
[19]
Range F, Viranyi Z, Huber L (2007) Selective imitation in domestic dogs. Curr Biol 17: 868–872.
[20]
Kaminski J, Nitzschner M, Wobber V, Tennie C, Br？uer J, et al. (2011) Do dogs distinguish rational from irrational acts? Anim Behav 81: 195–203.
[21]
Caron AJ (2009) Comprehension of the representational mind in infancy. Dev Rev 29: 69–95.
[22]
Perner J, Ruffman T (2005) Infants' Insight into the Mind: How Deep? Science 308: 214–216.
