Poster #194 - 18 month olds’ selective imitation of linguistic ingroups: Efficiency does not always triumph

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Infants and young children have been shown to learn ostensively demonstrated cognitively opaque sub-efficient manner actions from their linguistic ingroup members over linguistic outgroup members (Buttlemann, et al., 2013; Howard et al., 2015) Yet as Pinkham and Jaswal (2011) showed, infants, in the case that they had prior experience in attaining the goal efficiently by themselves, do not tend to imitate cognitively opaque sub-efficient manners. To reconcile these findings, we suggest that whether self-discovered efficiency is privileged over sub-efficient manner actions depends on social identity of the demonstrator. We hypothesize that efficiency will be prioritized over ostensively shown sub-efficiency if the sub-efficiency delivered by an outgroup member, but sub-efficiency will triumph efficiency if it sub-efficient manner action is delivered by an ingroup member.
We tested 32 18-month-old monolingual infants (18 females) in a head-touch imitation paradigm in two between-subject conditions: “linguistic ingroup” (n=16, 10 females) and “linguistic outgroup” (n=16, 8 females). Depending on which condition the infants were randomly allocated to either the ingroup demonstrator or the outgroup demonstrator entered the testing room, sat at the table facing the infants, and told them a story that took approximately 30 seconds either in infant’s own language (i.e. Hungarian) or in a foreign language (i.e. Turkish) in an infant-directed manner. Afterwards, the demonstrator brought a touch sensitive light-box apparatus to the table, and ostensively performed a hands-free head-touch action three times on the apparatus (as in: Kiraly et al., 2013). Lastly, she pushed the apparatus towards the infant and left the room. Infants were given 20 seconds to interact with the light-box, and we coded whether they first acted on the apparatus with their hands, and whether there was a head-touch action imitation later.
Half of the infants in the “ingroup-first” condition perseverated in lighting up the box using their heads despite having already successfully lit up the box with their hands. In the “outgroup-first” condition, instead, only one infant acted on the box with her head after operating it via her hands, (p = .01, by Fisher’s exact test), closely replicating Buttlemann et al. (2013). These findings suggest that the propensity to learn sub-efficient action manners from culturally relevant demonstrators (linguistic ingroups) may have evolved to support the intergenerational transmission of normative and group-specific knowledge (e.g. manners, conventions, ritualistic actions).

Authors

• Nazli Altinok, Cognitive Development Center, Central European University
  Presenting Author

• Ildikó Király, MTA-ELTE Momentum Social Minds Research Group / Central European University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gyorgy Gergely, Cognitive Development Center, Central European University
  Non-Presenting Author