Rational imitation in 12-month-old infants

Abstract

engage in “rational imitation. ” To investigate the development and flexibility of this skill, we tested 12-month-olds on a different but analogous task. Infants watched as an adult made a toy animal use a particular action to get to an endpoint. In 1 condi-tion there was a barrier that prevented a more straightforward action and so gave the actor no choice but to use the demonstrated action. In the other condition there was no barrier, so the actor had a free choice to use the demonstrated action or not. Twelve-month-olds showed the same pattern of results as in Gergely and colleagues’ study: They copied the particular action demonstrated more often when the adult freely chose to use the action than when she was forced to use it. Twelve-month-olds, too, thus show an understanding of others ’ intentions as rational choices and can use this understanding in cultural learning contexts. When children imitate an adult’s action they can, in some circumstances, reveal their understanding of the intentional structure of that action. Most famously, Meltzoff (1995) found that in a series of imitation tasks, 18-month-old infants reproduced not the exact bodily motions of an adult, but the result the adult intended to achieve—even though all infants saw was the adult trying and failing to achieve the result. This finding is most often interpreted as revealing that infants understand the goal of the adult’s action. Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) repli-cated this finding for 18-month-olds (and Johnson, Booth, & O’Hearn, 2001, for 15-month-olds), but not for 12-month-olds. The fact that 12-month-olds do not reproduce the adult’s unfulfilled goal does not mean that they do not understand goals at all. To succeed in Meltzoff’s (1995)