Mimicking infants rather than adults – how infants choose their models.

The infant academy by Joshua Reynolds

Parents are often afraid of what happens once their children hit puberty and stop emulating their parents. Recent research suggests that this fear should start a lot earlier: in infancy. Of course, infants need their parents to learn but they need other infants when it comes to imitating things they already know.

Two recent articles by Zmyj from the Ruhr university in Bochum and colleagues present convincing evidence to back up infants’ occasional preference for peer imitation. First, when presented with videos of people playing with novel toys in familiar ways, fourteen month olds imitate a peer more than an older child aged 3.5 or an adult. Secondly, when presented with similar videos of people performing simple gestures (banging on the table, waving, clapping…) they again imitated a 14 month old more often than an older child or an adult.

These results are curious because at this age infants typically spend more time with their parents than with other infants. Furthermore, as far as imitation is used to learn new things the infants should prefer adults who are more knowledgeable. When it comes to novel actions the learning objective does actually prevail. Switching on a new lamp with the head or building a rattle is more likely to be copied from an adult model rather than an infant model (Seehagen & Herbert, 2011; Zmyj, Daum et al., 2012).

When it comes to infant-infant imitation, it may come out of a desire to belong to the same social group as the model, a sort of precursor to facebook’s Like button. Infant-adult imitation, on the other hand, may be more like a student-teacher relationship.

This set of studies powerfully shows that age matters to infants. They copy the behaviour of others depending on how old the model is and what sort of behaviour is shown. This sort of reasoning was long thought to be beyond 1 ½ year olds. Recent evidence, however, shows that infants play a more active part in choosing who to emulate than you may think.

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Seehagen, S.,, & Herbert, J.S. (2011). Infant Imitation From Televised Peer and Adult Models Infancy, 16 (2), 113-136 DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2010.00045.x

Zmyj, N., Aschersleben, G., Prinz, W., & Daum, M. (2012). The Peer Model Advantage in Infants’ Imitation of Familiar Gestures Performed by Differently Aged Models. Frontiers in psychology, 3 PMID: 22833732

Zmyj, N., Daum, M.M.,, Prinz, W.,, Nielsen, M.,, & Aschersleben, G. (2012). Fourteen-month-olds’ imitation of differently aged models Infant and Child Developement, 21 (3), 250-266 DOI: 10.1002/icd.750

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image: By Joshua Reynolds (jundurrahman.files.wordpress.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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