The Rationality of (Over)imitation

Imitation is a powerful and ubiquitous social learning strategy, fundamental for the development of individual skills and cultural traditions. Recent research on the cognitive foundations and development of imitation, though, presents a surprising picture: Although even infants imitate in selective,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perspectives on psychological science 2018-11, Vol.13 (6), p.678-687
Main Authors: Keupp, Stefanie, Behne, Tanya, Rakoczy, Hannes
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Children
Cognitive development
Cultural tradition
Imitation
Infants
Parsing
Rationality
Social learning
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Imitation is a powerful and ubiquitous social learning strategy, fundamental for the development of individual skills and cultural traditions. Recent research on the cognitive foundations and development of imitation, though, presents a surprising picture: Although even infants imitate in selective, efficient, and rational ways, children and adults engage in overimitation. Rather than imitating selectively and efficiently, they sometimes faithfully reproduce causally irrelevant actions as much as relevant ones. In this article, we suggest a new perspective on this phenomenon by integrating established findings on children’s more general capacities for rational action parsing with newer findings on overimitation. We suggest that overimitation is a consequence of children’s growing capacities to understand causal and social constraints in relation to goals and that it rests on the human capacity to represent observed actions simultaneously on different levels of goal hierarchies.
ISSN:1745-6916
1745-6924
DOI:10.1177/1745691618794921