Poster #173 - How Prior Experience and Pedagogical Cues Influence Children's Imitation: Evidence from an Eastern Culture

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

Imitation plays an important role in the early social-cognitive development. A number of studies have documented the influence of both prior experience (Williamson & Meltzoff, 2011; Williamson, Meltzoff, & Markman, 2008) and pedagogical cues (Buchsbaum, Gopnik, Griffiths, & Shafto, 2011; Kiraly, Csibra, & Gergely, 2013) on Western children’s imitation. The purpose of this research reported here was to explore how these same factors affect Chinese children’s imitation of goal-directed acts.

We measured Chinese 4-year-old children’s (N = 80, M = 52.33 months, SD = 4.99 months) action reproduction in four object-directed tasks. Each child was randomly assigned to one of four groups. Children in the baseline group received no demonstration. In three other groups, an experimenter performed a series of distinctive target acts on each object and they enabled the same outcome. The difference among these groups were that: (i) in the Demonstration group the experimenter showed the target acts while providing pedagogical cues, (ii) in the Demonstration + No pedagogical cues group the experimenter showed the same target acts but did not accompany them with pedagogical cues, and (iii) in the Prior experience + Demonstration group, the experimenter first gave the children the object to manipulate by themselves and then followed this with the Demonstration with accompanying pedagogical cues.

Following the initial period, the test phase of immediate imitation was exactly the same for children in all four groups: Children were handed the object to see if they would reproduce the experimenter’s arbitrary target actions before retrieving the toy. For scoring, children obtained one point for each target act they performed, yielding an imitation score ranging from 0 to 12 for each child (4 objects were used and 3 target acts on each = 0-12 score).

One-way ANOVA with showed a significant effect of the experimental group, F (3, 76) = 30.92, p < .001. Follow-up comparisons showed that children in the Demonstration group, the Prior experience + Demonstration group, and the Demonstration + No pedagogical cues group reproduced significant more means than were children in the baseline group (ps < .001). However, there was no significant difference between the Demonstration group and the Demonstration + No pedagogical cues (p = .61), the Demonstration group and the Prior experience + Demonstration group (p = .46), the Demonstration + No pedagogical cues group and the Prior experience + Demonstration group (p = .99). In the Prior experience + Demonstration group, the children who had unsuccessful experience did not reproduce significant more target acts than were children who had successful experience, t (78) = －1.13, p = .26.

Children’s imitation of the adult’s demonstration was influenced neither by their prior experience nor by the pedagogical cues. This study provides data on child imitation from a less “individualistic” culture than found in the U.S. and other Western countries. Taken together, the current work expands our knowledge about the nature, scope, and functions of children’s imitation, and adds to a growing body of cross-cultural studies on childhood imitation.

Authors

• Zhidan Wang, Jiangsu Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Haijing Wang, Jiangsu Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author