Abstract:

Children are selective in the social models they choose to learn from, and model familiarity may impact the likelihood of children imitating their actions. Beyond familiarity, a child's emotional connection to a social model may influence the likelihood of learning from them, due to either affiliative motivations, or due to an established history of receiving pedagogical cues from the model. In this study, we explored the impact of both familiarity and emotional connection upon children’s overimitation of adult models by manipulating the warm-up experience children received. Children aged between 4- and 12-years-old (N=207, tested in Switzerland) received either a positive or neutral warm-up. In the positive warm-up, the experimenter engaged in conversation with the child while jointly looking at a book and responded positively to any opinions expressed by the child, while in the neutral warm-up, the experimenter left the child to read alone. Children then observed either the same adult or a novel adult demonstrate how to open a puzzle box, incorporating irrelevant actions. Data analysis is ongoing, and preliminary results suggest that neither the valence of the warm-up nor familiarity with the experimenter influenced children’s rates of overimitation, which decreased with age across all conditions.

Speaker's social media:

@rachelaharrison