The Effect of Social Awareness on Infant Synchronous Imitation
Velayo, Bianca C.
2011
- Infants use imitation to learn object affordances and to communicate so that they can become better connected to their environment. In this experiment, I looked at 17-19 month old infants' responses to three different imitation paradigms to study social influences in infant imitation. Furthermore, the present study explored infants' utilization of synchronous imitation as a communicative outlet. ... read moreThe findings show that infants formed a preference for an object previously modeled on by an experimenter and infants took a significantly longer time to imitate when presented with an object prior to any demonstration compared to their performance in the other imitation paradigms. Consistent with my hypothesis, I found that the more social infants engaged in sustained synchronous imitation compared to their less social peers. Additionally, the more social infants received lower synchronous imitation scores when presented with novel stimuli. The results suggest that both social and cognitive skills are involved in communicating via synchronous imitation. These findings have implications in pedagogical approaches. Infants are not receptive to ostensive stimuli upon receiving an object without any demonstration or instructionread less
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- bg257r92p
- Component ID:
- tufts:UA005.006.122.00001
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