Carry-over effects of tool functionality and previous unsuccessfulness increase overimitation in children.

[en] Children 'overimitate' causally irrelevant actions in experiments where both irrelevant and relevant actions involve a single common tool. This study design may make it harder for children to recognize the irrelevant actions, as the perceived functionality of the tool during the demonstration of the relevant action may be carried over to the irrelevant action, potentially increasing overimitation. Moreover, little is known how overimitation is affected by the demonstrator's expressed emotions and the child's prior success with the task. Here, 131 nine- to ten-year-old French and German children first engaged in a tool-based task, being successful or unsuccessful, and then watched an adult demonstrating the solution involving one irrelevant and one relevant action before smiling or remaining neutral. These actions were performed with the same tool or with two separate tools, testing potential carry-over effects of the functionality of the relevant action on the irrelevant action. We show that overimitation was higher when the same tool was used for both actions and when children were previously unsuccessful, but was not affected by the demonstrator's displayed emotion. Our results suggest that future overimitation research should account for the number of tools used in a demonstration and participants' previous task experience.

Disciplines :

Social, industrial & organizational psychology

Author, co-author :

Frick, Aurélien ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences cliniques ; Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK ; Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples, Italy

Schleihauf, Hanna ; Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA ; Cognitive Ethology Laboratory, German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany

Satchell, Liam P; Department of Psychology, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

Gruber, Thibaud ; Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Language :

English

Title :

Carry-over effects of tool functionality and previous unsuccessfulness increase overimitation in children.

Publication date :

July 2021

Journal title :

Royal Society Open Science

eISSN :

2054-5703

Publisher :

Royal Society Publishing, England

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

201373

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.201373

Funders :

SNF - Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Funding text :

Ethics. Ethical approvals were received from the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland and the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, as well as from the participating schools. Data accessibility. The data supporting the findings of this study as well as the videos of the demonstrators used in this study are available on the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/bstcz/. Authors’ contributions. A.F. and T.G. conceived the study. A.F. and H.S. collected the data in France and Germany, respectively. H.S. and L.P.S. analysed the data. A.F. wrote the first version of this article and all authors provided critical reviews and approved the final version. Competing interests. We have no competing interests. Funding. A.F. was supported by a doctoral scholarship from Suor Orsola Benincasa University and a Research Support Grant from the University of Edinburgh. H.S. was supported by a fellowship of the International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication (IMPRS NeuroCom). T.G. was supported by the Swiss National Science foundation (grant nos. CR13I1_162720/1 and PCEFP1_186832). Acknowledgements. We thank all participating schools that took part in this study. A.F. thanks Helen Wright for helpful comments made on previous versions of this article, Diane Austry for providing help with the double coding and Hélène Ferrandez and William Chevalier for serving as demonstrators in the video recordings.

Available on ORBi :

since 19 May 2022

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