Browsing by Subject "Social situations"
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Item Open Access Cultural affordances: Does model reliability affect over-imitation in preschoolers(Elsevier Ltd, 2021-03) Jedediah W.P., Allen; Sümer, Cansu; Ilgaz, HandeOne 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.Item Open Access How to help: can more active behavioral measures help transcend the infant false-belief debate?(Elsevier Ltd, 2015) Allen, J. W. P.The use of looking time procedures for the claim that infants understand other's false-beliefs has drawn criticism. In response, Buttelmann, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2009) have argued for the use of a more active behavioral measure involving children's willingness to help others. However, the current study challenges Buttelmann et al.’s response on both theoretical and methodological grounds. Theoretically, Buttelmann et al. take a mindreading framework for granted and are thus committed to the same type of “rich” interpretations that have accompanied infant looking procedures more broadly. Methodologically, the current study challenges Buttelmann et al.’s interpretation that children were using the adult's false-belief to determine how to help in this paradigm. To test our alternative perspective, mentalistic and non-mentalistic interpretations of preschooler's helping behavior were compared. In the original study, the adult's false-belief was conflated with the playing of a trick. When these two factors were separated, children's helping behavior was not consistent with the adult's false-belief. Second, when the situation was characterized in terms of a hiding scenario (instead of playing a trick), older children altered their helping behavior accordingly. Together, these results provided evidence that children in the active-helping paradigm did not use the adult's false-belief to determine how to help and that the broader social situation is an important variable for understanding other's actions. In conclusion, the use of more active behavioral measures alone does not resolve the controversy that has played out with respect to infant looking procedures. Instead, any adequate methodological modifications must be accompanied by theoretical considerations as well.Item Open Access Whence Container?(S. Karger AG, 2017) Allen, J. W. P.; Bickhard, M. H.The current target article provides a robust investigation of the “cultural character” of cognitive development. This investigation has both theoretical and empirical/ methodological aspects. Methodologically, the authors argue for a unit of analysis concerning the development of object knowledge that includes other agents engaged in communication with the infant (i.e., that includes the sociocultural aspects of the infants’ developmental environment). We agree with such a position and further illustrate its utility in our own analysis of the phenomenon of overimitation. With respect to the underlying theory, we agree with the arguments against strictly cognitivist frameworks (including those with a more recent “embodied” flavor), as well as the fundamental importance ascribed to sociality and culture. However, for some aspects of the pragmatics of the object paradigm we would suggest narrowing the scope about the necessity of culture for development while in other respects we would like to suggest possible elaborations or extensions. Perhaps most fundamentally, we suggest that the physical versus cultural split that frames the target article discussion is not as metaphysically fundamental as seems to be presupposed.