From over‐imitation to super‐copying: Adults imitate causally irrelevant aspects of tool use with higher fidelity than young children
Abstract
Recent research has revealed a striking tendency in young children to imitate even causally irrelevant actions, a phenomenon dubbed ‘over‐imitation’. To investigate whether children develop beyond this, we allowed both adults and children to witness either a child or adult model performing goal‐relevant and goal‐irrelevant actions to extract a reward from a transparent puzzle box. Surprisingly, copying of irrelevant actions increased with age, with the adults performing the task with less efficiency than the children. Participants of all ages were more likely to perform the irrelevant actions performed by an adult model, than by a child model. These results suggest that people may become more imitative as they mature, whilst selectively copying particular models with a high level of fidelity. We suggest that this combination of faithful copying and selectivity underwrites the powerful social learning necessary for the level of cultural transmission on which our species depends.
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Both children and adults engage in more ritualistic imitation when the model is an adult, perhaps because social pressure is higher.
“Both children and adults engage in more ritualistic imitation when the model is an adult, perhaps because social pressure is higher (McGuigan, Makinson, & Whiten, 2011).”
From The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework (2018) · cites this paper as McGuigan, Makinson, & Whiten, 2011
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- Authors
- McGuigan, N., Makinson, J., & Whiten, A.
- Affiliations
- Heriot-Watt University (GB)
- University of St Andrews (GB)
- Corresponding author
- McGuigan, Nicola
- Venue
- British Journal of Psychology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2011-01-17
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-18
- ISSN
- 0007-1269 (ISSN-L)
- 2044-8295
- OpenAlex
- W1954390800
- Cited by
- 322
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 63 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 16 · 2014: 17 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 23
- FWCI
- 30.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- British Journal of Psychology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- British Academy
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Keywords
- overimitation, imitation, tool use, causal relevance, developmental differences, social learning, cultural transmission
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Age Factors, Analysis of Variance, Child Behavior, Child, Preschool, Female, Goals, Humans, Imitative Behavior, Male, Middle Aged, Problem Solving, Social Behavior, Task Performance and Analysis, Young Adult
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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