pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The hidden structure of overimitation - PubMed

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2007

The hidden structure of overimitation

Derek E Lyons et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007.

Abstract

Young children are surprisingly judicious imitators, but there are also times when their reproduction of others' actions appears strikingly illogical. For example, children who observe an adult inefficiently operating a novel object frequently engage in what we term overimitation, persistently reproducing the adult's unnecessary actions. Although children readily overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees ignore, this curious effect has previously attracted little interest; it has been assumed that children overimitate not for theoretically significant reasons, but rather as a purely social exercise. In this paper, however, we challenge this view, presenting evidence that overimitation reflects a more fundamental cognitive process. We show that children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly. This automatic causal encoding process allows children to rapidly calibrate their causal beliefs about even the most opaque physical systems, but it also carries a cost. When some of the adult's purposeful actions are unnecessary-even transparently so-children are highly prone to mis-encoding them as causally significant. The resulting distortions in children's causal beliefs are the true cause of overimitation, a fact that makes the effect remarkably resistant to extinction. Despite countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings, children are frequently unable to avoid reproducing the adult's irrelevant actions because they have already incorporated them into their representation of the target object's causal structure.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.

The puzzle objects and examples of the corresponding experimenter action sequences (Table 1 provides text descriptions). In addition to those shown here, a second action sequence variant was also used for each object, with presentation counterbalanced across participants. The two sequences for a given object differed in the specific means that the adult used to operate each mechanism. On the Puzzle Box (based on a stimulus from ref. 10), for example, the red bolt was pushed out in one sequence and pulled out in the other. For more detail and depictions of the other action sequences, see the

SI Methods

and

SI Figs. 7–10

.

Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.

Overimitation persists despite contrary task demands. Experiment 1A participants who observed the experimenter produced unnecessary actions significantly more often than baseline participants who opened the puzzle objects independently.

Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.

Overimitation persists beyond the boundaries of the experiment. The apparent conclusion of the study in Experiment 1B did not significantly change overimitation levels for the Cage and Dome. Overimitation on the Puzzle Box was attenuated but remained four times more frequent than in the baseline condition.

Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.

Overimitation is not blocked by direct contrary instruction. Explicitly warning Experiment 2A participants to ignore any unnecessary actions performed by the experimenter failed to diminish overimitation.

Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.

Overimitation is subject to contact constraints. Overimitation was significantly more frequent on the connected form of the Igloo than on the disconnected form. Overimitation on the disconnected form failed to exceed the background level of irrelevant action production observed in the baseline condition.

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Gergely G, Csibra G. Interact Stud. 2005;6:463–481.
    1. Gergely G, Csibra G. In: Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Human Interaction. Enfield NJ, Levenson SC, editors. Oxford: Berg Publishers; 2006. pp. 229–255.
    1. Heyes CM, Foster CL. Q J Exp Psychol. 2002;55A:593–607. - PubMed
    1. Meltzoff AN, Gopnik A. In: Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism. Baron-Cohen S, Tager-Flusberg H, Cohen DJ, editors. Oxford: Oxford Univ Press; 1993. pp. 335–366.
    1. Tomasello M. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press; 1999.

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources