Developmental changes in the influence of conventional and instrumental cues on over-imitation in 3- to 6-year-old children

•The pre-demonstration instruction was presented instrumentally or conventionally.•The post-demonstration task instruction varied in the level of instrumentality.•The older children often over-imitated irrespective of the instruction provided.•The youngest children only over-imitated within a conven...

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Vydáno v:	Journal of experimental child psychology Ročník 145; s. 34 - 47
Hlavní autoři:	Moraru, Cristina-Andreea, Gomez, Juan-Carlos, McGuigan, Nicola
Médium:	Journal Article
Jazyk:	angličtina
Vydáno:	United States Elsevier Inc 01.05.2016 Elsevier BV
Témata:	Age differences Behavior Causality Child Child development Child Development - physiology Child psychology Child, Preschool Children Context Conventional frame Conventional verbal cues Cues Direct Instruction Female Fidelity Humans Imitation Imitative Behavior Instrumental frame Instrumental verbal cues Male Motivation Older children Over-imitation Preschool children Social factors Social learning Social Learning - physiology Teaching Instrumental frame Over-imitation Social learning Conventional frame Instrumental verbal cues Conventional verbal cues
ISSN:	0022-0965, 1096-0457, 1096-0457
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Shrnutí:	•The pre-demonstration instruction was presented instrumentally or conventionally.•The post-demonstration task instruction varied in the level of instrumentality.•The older children often over-imitated irrespective of the instruction provided.•The youngest children only over-imitated within a conventional frame. Previous studies have shown that children in the preschool period are fastidious imitators who copy models with such high levels of fidelity that task efficiency may be compromised. This over-imitative tendency, and the pervasive nature of it, has led to many explorations and theoretical interpretations of this behavior, including social, causal, and conventional explanations. In support of the conventional account, recent research has shown that children are more likely to over-imitate when the task is framed using conventional verbal cues than when it is framed using instrumental verbal cues. The aim of the current study was to determine whether 3- to 6-year-old children (N=185, mean age=60months) would over-imitate when presented with instrumental and conventional verbal cues, which varied only minimally and were more directly comparable between instrumental and conventional contexts than those used in previous studies. In addition to varying the overall context, we also varied the instrumental prompt used such that the cues provided ranged in the extent to which they provided explicit instruction to omit the irrelevant actions. Counter to our predictions, and the high levels of over-imitation witnessed in previous studies, the older children frequently over-imitated irrespective of the context provided, whereas the youngest children over-imitated selectively, including the irrelevant actions only when the task was presented in a conventional frame. We propose that the age differences found following an instrumental presentation are a result of the youngest children being more open to the motivation of learning the causality of the task, whereas the older children were more strongly motivated to adopt a social convention.
Bibliografie:	ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 14 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0022-0965 1096-0457 1096-0457
DOI:	10.1016/j.jecp.2015.11.017