Department of Psychology, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Infant Behav Dev. 2013 Dec;36(4):736-48. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.08.005. Epub 2013 Sep 1.
Deferred imitation studies are used to assess infants' declarative memory performance. These studies have found that deferred imitation performance improves with age, which is usually attributed to advancing memory capabilities. Imitation studies, however, are also used to assess infants' action understanding. In this second research program it has been observed that infants around the age of one year imitate selectively, i.e., they imitate certain kinds of target actions and omit others. In contrast to this, two-year-olds usually imitate the model's exact actions. 18-month-olds imitate more exactly than one-year-olds, but more selectively than two-year-olds, a fact which makes this age group especially interesting, since the processes underlying selective vs. exact imitation are largely debated. The question, for example, if selective attention to certain kinds of target actions accounts for preferential imitation of these actions in young infants is still open. Additionally, relations between memory capabilities and selective imitation processes, as well as their role in shaping 18-month-olds' neither completely selective, nor completely exact imitation have not been thoroughly investigated yet. The present study, therefore, assessed 18-month-olds' gaze toward two types of actions (functional vs. arbitrary target actions) and the model's face during target action demonstration, as well as infants' deferred imitation performance. Although infants' fixation times to functional target actions were not longer than to arbitrary target actions, they imitated the functional target actions more frequently than the arbitrary ones. This suggests that selective imitation does not rely on selective gaze toward functional target actions during the demonstration phase. In addition, a post hoc analysis of interindividual differences suggested that infants' attention to the model's social-communicative cues might play an important role in exact imitation, meaning the imitation of both functional and arbitrary target actions.
延迟模仿研究用于评估婴儿的陈述性记忆表现。这些研究发现，延迟模仿表现随着年龄的增长而提高，这通常归因于记忆能力的提高。然而，模仿研究也用于评估婴儿的动作理解。在第二个研究项目中，人们观察到，大约一岁的婴儿会选择性地模仿，即他们模仿某些特定类型的目标动作，而忽略其他动作。相比之下，两岁的婴儿通常会模仿模型的精确动作。18 个月大的婴儿比 1 岁的婴儿模仿得更准确，但比 2 岁的婴儿更有选择性，这一事实使这个年龄组特别有趣，因为选择性模仿和精确模仿背后的过程在很大程度上存在争议。例如，选择性地关注某些特定类型的目标动作是否能解释婴儿对这些动作的优先模仿，这个问题仍然没有答案。此外，记忆能力与选择性模仿过程之间的关系，以及它们在塑造 18 个月大婴儿的既不完全选择性、也不完全精确模仿方面的作用，尚未得到彻底研究。因此，本研究评估了 18 个月大的婴儿在目标动作演示过程中对两种类型的动作（功能目标动作和任意目标动作）和模型面部的注视，以及婴儿的延迟模仿表现。尽管婴儿对功能目标动作的注视时间并不长于对任意目标动作的注视时间，但他们更频繁地模仿功能目标动作而非任意目标动作。这表明，选择性模仿并不依赖于在演示阶段对功能目标动作的选择性注视。此外，个体间差异的事后分析表明，婴儿对模型的社会交际线索的关注可能在精确模仿中发挥重要作用，这意味着对功能目标动作和任意目标动作的模仿。
