Browsing by Subject "Over-imitation"

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Open Access
Cultural affordances: Does model reliability affect over-imitation in preschoolers
(Elsevier Ltd, 2021-03) Jedediah W.P., Allen; Sümer, Cansu; Ilgaz, Hande
One general perspective on why children over-imitate is that they are learning about the normatively correct way of doing things. If correct, then characteristics of the demonstrator should be relevant. Accordingly, the current study aimed to investigate how the reliability of an adult model influences children’s selectivity of what to imitate in an over-imitation situation (i.e., when some of the actions are causally irrelevant). Seventy-eight preschoolers between 3 and 6 years of age participated at school or in the lab on four tasks. A canonical trust paradigm was used to manipulate model reliability in terms of past accuracy. Children then watched either the reliable or unreliable model open a transparent box using the same relevant and irrelevant actions. In addition, children completed a standard ToM battery. Results indicated that children were more likely to over-imitate from a demonstration given by the reliable versus unreliable model. Children’s ToM abilities were not related to their over-imitation behavior but showed some relations to their trust performance. Overall, the results provide support for a social situational approach to over-imitation that fits most closely with the norm learning perspective.
Open Access
How not to find over-imitation in animals
(S. Karger AG, 2024-02-20) Allen, Jedediah W. P.; Andrews, Kristin
While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to the over-imitation hypothesis – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals.
Open Access
Social meta-learning: learning how to make use of others as a resource for further learning
(Springer, 2017) Allen, Jedediah W. P.; Ilgaz, Hande; Hakli, R.; Seibt, J.
While there is general consensus that robust forms of social learning enable the possibility of human cultural evolution, the specific nature, origins, and development of such learning mechanisms remains an open issue. The current paper offers an action-based approach to the study of social learning in general and imitation learning in particular. From this action-based perspective, imitation itself undergoes learning and development and is modeled as an instance of social meta-learning – children learning how to use others as a resource for further learning. This social meta-learning perspective is then applied empirically to an ongoing debate about the reason children imitate causally unnecessary actions while learning about a new artifact (i.e., over-imitate). Results suggest that children over-imitate because it is the nature of learning about social realities in which cultural artifacts are a central aspect.