Kolling Thorsten, Oturai Gabriella, Knopf Monika
Developmental Psychology Lab, Department of Psychology, Goethe University, D-60323 Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
Developmental Psychology Lab, Department of Psychology, Goethe University, D-60323 Frankfurt/Main, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2014 Aug;124:18-35. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.01.016. Epub 2014 Apr 13.
Infants and children do not blindly copy every action they observe during imitation tasks. Research demonstrated that infants are efficient selective imitators. The impact of selective perceptual processes (selective attention) for selective deferred imitation, however, is still poorly described. The current study, therefore, analyzed 12-month-old infants' looking behavior during demonstration of two types of target actions: arbitrary versus functional actions. A fully automated remote eye tracker was used to assess infants' looking behavior during action demonstration. After a 30-min delay, infants' deferred imitation performance was assessed. Next to replicating a memory effect, results demonstrate that infants do imitate significantly more functional actions than arbitrary actions (functionality effect). Eye-tracking data show that whereas infants do not fixate significantly longer on functional actions than on arbitrary actions, amount of fixations and amount of saccades differ between functional and arbitrary actions, indicating different encoding mechanisms. In addition, item-level findings differ from overall findings, indicating that perceptual and conceptual item features influence looking behavior. Looking behavior on both the overall and item levels, however, does not relate to deferred imitation performance. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that, on the one hand, selective imitation is not explainable merely by selective attention processes. On the other hand, notwithstanding this reasoning, attention processes on the item level are important for encoding processes during target action demonstration. Limitations and future studies are discussed.
婴儿和儿童在模仿任务中不会盲目地模仿他们观察到的每一个动作。研究表明，婴儿是高效的选择性模仿者。然而，选择性知觉过程（选择性注意）对选择性延迟模仿的影响仍鲜有描述。因此，本研究分析了12个月大婴儿在两种类型的目标动作示范过程中的注视行为：任意动作与功能性动作。使用全自动远程眼动仪评估婴儿在动作示范过程中的注视行为。延迟30分钟后，评估婴儿的延迟模仿表现。除了重现记忆效应外，结果表明婴儿模仿功能性动作的次数明显多于任意动作（功能性效应）。眼动追踪数据显示，虽然婴儿注视功能性动作的时间并不显著长于注视任意动作的时间，但功能性动作和任意动作在注视次数和扫视次数上存在差异，这表明存在不同的编码机制。此外，项目层面的研究结果与总体研究结果不同，这表明知觉和概念性项目特征会影响注视行为。然而，总体层面和项目层面的注视行为均与延迟模仿表现无关。综上所述，研究结果表明，一方面，选择性模仿不能仅仅用选择性注意过程来解释。另一方面，尽管有此推断，但项目层面的注意过程对目标动作示范期间的编码过程很重要。本文还讨论了研究的局限性和未来的研究方向。
