Humans are by nature social creatures, far more so than other primates. Our desire to be accepted by our in-groups is universal and innate. It also comes early: multiple studies have demonstrated how preschool-age imitation of adult behaviour leads to acquiring new skills, sharing cultural knowledge and fostering a sense of affiliation.
One form of this behaviour is overimitation — the tendency to copy actions that are not necessary to achieve a goal. While overimitation has been studied in children aged between three and five, there has been little research on its practice by children younger than two.
A new study by Concordia researchers published in the journal Frontiers in Developmental Psychology examines the emergence of overimitation in infants aged between 16 and 21 months to see if and how it is linked to social affiliation and other forms of imitation.
"The literature suggests that a person — even an adult — engages in overimitation because they want to affiliate with the person showing them the actions," says the paper's lead author Marilyne Dragon , a PhD student at the Cognitive and Language Development Lab . "They want to show that they want to be like them." Dogs as well as humans, but no other primates, show overimitation.
The researchers found that young children engaged in low rates of overimitation and that it was not driven by in-group preference — meaning they were not acting to please someone similar to themselves. This suggests that overimitation for social affiliation reasons may emerge later. But they did find that other types of imitation associated with memory and cognition were closely correlated.
Memory and social cognition linked
The researchers recruited 73 children with a mean average age of just over 18 months. Each child was assigned four tasks. Each task was meant to test a specific type of imitation. All of them depended on an experimenter demonstrating a task to the child and scoring them based on their responses.
The overimitation task involved opening a box containing a toy in a sequence of three actions, including one that was irrelevant to the goal; the elicited imitation task, originally designed to test memory, required the child to copy a sequence of three actions correctly, such as putting a teddy to bed with a pillow and blanket.
For the unfulfilled intentions imitation task, an experimenter used play materials to accomplish an action like placing a string of beads in a cup but failed to accomplish the task. The child was then asked to successfully accomplish it.
Finally, the in-group preference task had the child seated in front of a screen showing a woman and a robot holding the same plush animal side by side and performing the same actions simultaneously. The experimenter hid behind a curtain underneath the screen and held the toys on a stick as if they were being offered by both the robot and woman. The children were scored on whether they reached for the robot's or the woman's toy first.
"We wanted to see if there was a desire to affiliate with someone who is more similar to them," Dragon says.
Only the elicited imitation and unfulfilled intentions imitation tasks were found to have a clear correlation. The other two had none.
"We suspect that there is a link between overimitation and in-group preference but that it emerges when the children are older, as shown by a recent study in our laboratory that will soon be submitted for publication," she says. By four and a half years of age, children who overimitate more tend to prefer children who are similar to them in gender and ethnicity.
"That shows a developmental pattern, with overimitation being linked to knowledge about group membership," adds co-author Diane Poulin-Dubois , a professor in the Department of Psychology .
Dragon believes the results indicate that overimitation's emergence requires further study given its importance in childhood development.
"It is important for parents and teachers to be mindful that their children will imitate them," she says. "They will mimic and copy actions that are not necessary, so that is something to keep in mind. We want children to develop critical thinking skills."
Read the cited paper: " 'I wanna be like you': testing the link between social affiliation and overimitation in infancy ."
