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Infants show stability of goal-directed imitation

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Hilbrink,  Elma
Language and Cognition Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
School of Psychology, Cardiff University;
INTERACT, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Sakkalou_J_Exp_Child_Psych_2013.pdf
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Citation

Sakkalou, E., Ellis-Davies, K., Fowler, N., Hilbrink, E., & Gattis, M. (2013). Infants show stability of goal-directed imitation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 1-9. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2012.09.005.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-EA08-A
Abstract
Previous studies have reported that infants selectively reproduce observed actions and have argued that this selectivity reflects understanding of intentions and goals, or goal-directed imitation. We reasoned that if selective imitation of goal-directed actions reflects understanding of intentions, infants should demonstrate stability across perceptually and causally dissimilar imitation tasks. To this end, we employed a longitudinal within-participants design to compare the performance of 37 infants on two imitation tasks, with one administered at 13 months and one administered at 14 months. Infants who selectively imitated goal-directed actions in an object-cued task at 13 months also selectively imitated goal-directed actions in a vocal-cued task at 14 months. We conclude that goal-directed imitation reflects a general ability to interpret behavior in terms of mental states.