Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2010 May;106(1):62-81. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2009.12.005. Epub 2010 Feb 8.
Five experiments were conducted to investigate infants' ability to transfer actions learned via imitation to new objects and to examine what components of the original context are critical to such transfer. Infants of 15 months observed an experimenter perform an action with one or two toys and then were offered a novel toy that was not demonstrated for them. In all experiments, infants performed target actions with the novel toy more frequently than infants who were offered the same toy but had seen no prior demonstrations. Infants exhibited transfer even when the specific part to be manipulated looked different across the toys, even when they had not performed the actions with the demonstration toys themselves, even when the actions produced no effects on the demonstrations, and even when the actions were demonstrated with only a single exemplar toy. Transfer was especially robust when infants not only observed but also practiced the target actions on the demonstration trials. Learning action affordances ("means") seems to be a central aspect of human imitation, and the propensity to apply these learned action affordances in new object contexts may be an important basis for technological innovation and invention.
进行了五项实验来研究婴儿将通过模仿学到的动作转移到新物体上的能力，并探讨原始环境的哪些成分对于这种转移至关重要。15 个月大的婴儿观察实验者用一个或两个玩具进行操作，然后提供一个新的玩具，这个新玩具没有向他们展示过。在所有实验中，与提供相同但没有看到之前演示的玩具的婴儿相比，婴儿用新玩具进行目标动作的频率更高。即使在玩具之间被操作的特定部分看起来不同的情况下，即使婴儿自己没有用演示玩具执行动作，即使演示中动作对演示没有产生任何影响，即使动作只使用单个范例玩具进行演示，婴儿也表现出了转移。当婴儿不仅观察而且在演示试验中练习目标动作时，转移尤其稳健。学习动作的可操作性（“手段”）似乎是人类模仿的一个核心方面，而将这些习得的动作可操作性应用于新的物体环境中的倾向可能是技术创新和发明的重要基础。
