Individual Differences in Young Children’s Faithful Imitation and Goal Emulation From Toddlerhood to Preschool Years

• In Event: Contextual and individual differences in young children’s cultural learning

Abstract

We know from decades of research that children are natural cultural learners, and they are capable of both acquiring opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, and discovering more efficient means to goal attainment through goal emulation. But the unique characteristics of individual children may also determine the course of their individual cultural learning pathways through development, akin to how children’s individual temperaments pave a path to the development of personality (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005). This study explores whether children’s cultural learning are characterized by individual differences which emerge early in ontogeny and persist over time.
We conducted a longitudinal study in which parents and children visited a lab three times across one year. Our initial sample included 48 2-year-old children (range = 23-32 mo). Among them, 43 returned after 6 months (±1 months) for a second visit, and 37 returned after 6 more months (±1 months) for a third visit. Children completed two imitation tasks during each visit. In the puzzle box task, an experimenter showed children three puzzle boxes. For each box, he demonstrated a series of actions that are either causally necessary or unnecessary for achieving the ultimate goal of retrieving a prize from the box. We measured how many unnecessary actions children copied as an indicator of faithful imitation, and how many necessary actions children copied as an indicator of goal emulation. In the “puppet show” task (Carpenter, et al., 2005), the experimenter moved a puppet to either a cardboard house (house condition) or a corresponding location without a house (no house condition), and he performed the action in a particular manner (a distinct action style accompanied with sound). We then measured how much children copied the manner of the puppet shows as an indicator of faithful imitation, and examined how they copied flexibly based on the conditions as an indicator of goal emulation.
Results showed consistent individual differences across tasks and visits. During children’s first visit, their responses in the puzzle box task and puppet show task correlated both in terms of the tendency to imitate faithfully, r (45) = .32, p = .03, and the tendency to emulate the goal, r (45) = .33, p = .03. When all measurements from the two tasks were submitted to a principle component analysis (PCA), results further confirmed the existence of two behavioral routines across different tasks and conditions: one corresponding to faithful imitation, and one corresponding to goal emulation (Figure 1). Longitudinal data revealed the individual differences in social learning persisted after 6 months for both faithful imitation, r (39) = .44, p = .005, and goal emulation, r (39) = .43, p = .006. The tendency for faithful imitation persisted after 1 year, r (33) = .43, p = .01. These results suggest that individual differences in children’s social learning may transcend beyond a particular task and remain stable across time. Such individual differences may contribute to the balance between keeping traditions and innovating on a group level, which is needed for a cumulative culture.

Authors

• Yue Yu, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy
  Non-Presenting Author