Chinese Journal of Psychology 2021, Vol.63, No.4, 335-356
DOI:10.6129/CJP.202112_63(4).0002
Familiarity of Actions Leads Infants to Privilege Goals in Their Imitation of Others’ Acts
Wei-Ping Wang（Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University）；Chi-Tai Huang（Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University；Research Center for Mind, Brain and Learning, National Chengchi University）
Abstract
During observational learning of goal-directed action, infants tend to simplify the form of action to ensure that the goal is copied. As recent findings suggest that infants’ sensitivity to the goal structure of action is reliant on their own experience with particular actions, the present study further examines whether the precedence of goal in infants’ imitation is susceptible to the familiarity of the presented action. Eighteen-month-old infants observed an adult hop or slide a toy animal into one of two boxes (box condition) or to a final location (no-box condition). The toy moved along either a straight-line path familiar to infants (Experiment 1) or a novel turning-line path (Experiment 2). Overall, in the box condition, infants were more likely to copy the goal box while ignoring the hopping and sliding motion; in the nobox condition, they produced the opposite pattern of imitation. However, further analyses of the tendency to put the toy into boxes showed that infants’ choice of the adult’s goal was significantly higher than chance only in Experiment 1, suggesting that familiar actions determines whether infants privilege goals in their imitation of others’ acts. To identify the goal of an agent’s action requires not only the perceivable outcome, but it also requires a perception-action transduction that transfers observed acts into infants’ own motor patterns. Familiar actions that infants are able to perform directly activate the equivalent body movements in their own motor repertoire. The results are consistent with the notion of direct mapping, suggesting that infants gain insight into goals through action experiences.
Keywords: Action familiarity; Direct mapping; Goal; Goal-directed; Imitation
