Human infants’ understanding of social imitation: Inferences of affiliation from third party observations

摘要

Highlights?Infants expect imitators to approach and affiliate with those who they imitated.?This suggests infants attach social significance to imitation before 6months of age.?Infants did not expect targets of imitation to similarly affiliate with imitators.?The asymmetry shows young infants can track individuals’ roles in social interaction.AbstractImitation is ubiquitous in positive social interactions. For adult and child observers, it also supports inferences about the participants in such interactions and their social relationships, but the origins of these inferences are obscure. Do infants attach social significance to this form of interaction? Here we test 4- to 5.5-month-old infants’ interpretation of imitation, asking if the imitative interactions they observe support inferences of social affiliation, across 10 experimental conditions that varied the modality of the imitation (movement vs. sound), the