Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, 05508-070 São Paulo, Brazil.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of São Paulo, 05508-070 São Paulo, Brazil.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 Oct;186:189-200. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.05.010. Epub 2019 Jul 8.
Overimitation is defined by a tendency to copy all actions executed by a model, even the clearly irrelevant ones. The motivational mechanisms and functionality of overimitation are still not well understood, but its possible adaptive meaning could be related to causal opacity of a great part of socially learned behaviors. This phenomenon has been widely replicated in several contexts and has been observed in the behavior of children over 2 years of age and even in adults. Despite the seeming robustness of overimitation, studies have shown that it is sensitive to some characteristics of a model observed such as age, familiarity, proficiency, and reputation. Our work intended to investigate the effect of information about the competence of an adult model on the copying of irrelevant actions by preschool children (5 years old) in a task. We tested the influence of self-declared information about the model competence and of the same kind of information given by third parties in a conversation about the model. Our results reveal no effect of both "self-declared competence" and "reputation" biases on overimitation. We discuss that this result may have occurred because other information available to participants, and not manipulated by us, was used to infer model competence such as the model's age and success in the task directly observed by the participants. Another potential explanation is that children use a "copy all, correct later" strategy in a context where only one model is available.
过度模仿是指一种倾向，即模仿模型执行的所有动作，即使是明显不相关的动作。过度模仿的动机机制和功能仍未得到很好的理解，但它可能的适应意义可能与社会学习行为的很大一部分因果不透明有关。这种现象在多个背景下得到了广泛的复制，并在 2 岁以上儿童的行为中观察到，甚至在成年人中也观察到。尽管过度模仿看起来很稳健，但研究表明，它对观察到的模型的一些特征敏感，例如年龄、熟悉度、熟练程度和声誉。我们的工作旨在研究关于成人模型能力的信息对学龄前儿童（5 岁）在任务中复制不相关动作的影响。我们测试了模型自我声明的能力信息以及模型在对话中提供的相同类型的信息对过度模仿的影响。我们的结果表明，这两种“自我声明的能力”和“声誉”偏见都没有对过度模仿产生影响。我们讨论了这一结果可能是因为参与者可用的其他信息，而不是我们操纵的信息，被用来推断模型的能力，例如模型的年龄和参与者直接观察到的任务中的成功。另一个潜在的解释是，在只有一个模型可用的情况下，儿童会使用“全部复制，稍后纠正”的策略。
