Modeling And Imitation Learning In Young Children PDF Download

This paper explores how young, pre-verbal children are able to learn which actions belong to which objects. It is clear that children learn these action-object pairs at an amazing rate during the first few years of life, just as they learn word-object pairs. Although researchers have looked at similar questions for language acquisition, very little work has been done extending these questions to explore how children pair actions with objects. Most likely, children learn these tasks through many channels including direct instruction and self-exploration of objects; however, these studies focus on the contribution of imitation in facilitating this type of learning. Since young children readily imitate the actions of others, imitation provides an efficient way to learn about their environment and enables the explosion of learned action-object pairs observed during the first few years of life. More specifically, these studies attempt to determine what strategies children use in order to determine what and how they should imitate. What helps a child to constrain the number of possible matches between an object and its canonical actions? And, what cues do children use to determine the important aspects of a model's demonstration? Study 1 presented 15- and 21-month-old children with a two-step action sequence using novel toys in which some of the actions were necessary and some were unnecessary to produce a desired effect. When these children were subsequently given a chance to interact with the toys, they systematically left out certain types of unnecessary actions. Study 2 investigated at what age children learn the importance of attending to a model's hands when learning how to manipulate a toy. There are many aspects of a model's behavior which could be imitated, but humans manipulate most objects with our hands so attending to what a model's hands are doing is especially important. The 21-month-olds in our study were able to both attend to and imitate the model's hands, while the 15-month-olds were not as consistent. Imitation has many demands. These studies are designed to provide some insights into how young children determine what and how to imitate.