Who do Children Prefer to Overimitate – a Matter of Context?

• In Event: Mechanisms underlying imitation, social learning, and social preferences

Abstract

Young children are known to imitate even actions that are clearly non-functional. This phenomenon, coined overimitation, is considered an essential mechanism for the transmission of cultural knowledge. Overimitation allows for a rapid proliferation of rituals, artefacts and skills between generations. However, while studies suggest that there is not only vertical (between generations) but also horizontal (within a generation) cultural transmission, it remains unknown why evidence for peer-to-peer overimitation is scarce. This study proposes that the peer-to-peer transmission of culture might be rooted in children’s play. We assume that the lack of research in favor of peer-to-peer overimitation is due to the emphasis of functional aspects in most experimental settings and hypothesize that children would indeed be keen to copy their peers if they are engaged in playful activities. To test this hypothesis, we asked 4-to 6-year-old children to retrieve a coin out of a box after observing a video of either a child or an adult model demonstrating both, causally relevant and irrelevant actions.
Once the coin had been taken out of the box, children could insert it into a toy machine in order to obtain a small reward. Participants were tested in either a playful or a functional context, which we manipulated with a respective priming activity and task framing. In the priming phase, children were tasked with sorting cards according to their shape and color (functional condition) or engaged in a fairy-tale play (playful condition). The imitation task in the test phase was verbally framed by using words such as “task”, “wooden box” and “coin” in the functional condition or “game”, “magic box” or “treasure” in the playful condition. Preliminary results from this ongoing study indicate an interaction of model and context supporting the hypothesis that children preferably copy peers in playful and adults in functional contexts. So far, we have tested 36 children in childcare centers and aim for a total sample size of 160 participants by March 2021.

Authors

• Jule Wolf, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
  Presenting Author

• Sabina M Pauen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
  Non-Presenting Author