Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development.
Dev Psychol. 2019 Dec;55(12):2630-2636. doi: 10.1037/dev0000832. Epub 2019 Oct 10.
From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Hai||om and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two versions of an overimitation paradigm. Across cultures, children selectively imitated more actions when the adult model was present compared to being absent, denoting a social motivation underlying overimitation. At the same time, children's imitation was not linked to their tendency to reengage the adult in a second, independent measure of social motivation. These results suggest that, across diverse cultures, children's imitative behavior is actuated by the attentive state of the model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
从很小的时候起，西方工业化社会的儿童就过度模仿他人的行为。然而，这种行为的潜在动机和文化特殊性仍然不清楚。在这里，来自纳米比亚两个农村地区（Hai||om 和 Ovambo）和一个德国城市地区的 3 至 8 岁儿童（N=125）在两个过度模仿范式版本中接受了测试。在不同的文化中，与成人模型不存在相比，当成人模型存在时，儿童会选择性地模仿更多的动作，这表明过度模仿背后存在一种社会动机。与此同时，儿童的模仿与他们在第二个独立的社会动机测量中重新与成人互动的倾向无关。这些结果表明，在不同的文化中，儿童的模仿行为是由模型的关注状态引起的。
