Infants' behavioral reenactment of "failed attempts": exploring the roles of emulation learning, stimulus enhancement, and understanding of intentions.

Full Abstract

Two studies were conducted to examine whether infants' reenactment of intended but unconsummated acts in A. N. Meltzoff's (1995) failed-attempt paradigm is due to reading the adult's underlying intention or to the effects of nonimitative social learning processes. Two novel conditions that emphasized the object affordances and the spatial contiguity of the object sets were devised. When infants' first actions only were counted, infants who observed the full-demonstration model produced more target acts. When all target acts produced within the 20-s response period were counted, infants in the emulation-learning and spatial contiguity conditions produced as many target acts as infants in the full-demonstration and failed-attempt conditions. This pattern of findings suggests that nonimitative social learning processes may influence infants' response in the behavioral reenactment paradigm.

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Author information

Author/s: Huang, Chi-Tai (CT); Heyes, Cecilia (C); Charman, Tony (T);

Affiliation: Department of Human Development, Tzu-Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Developmental psychology (Dev Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Sep; vol 38 (issue 5) : pp 840-55

Dates: Created 2002/09/10; Completed 2003/03/26; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12220059, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Infant
Infant Behavior - psychology
Intention
Learning - physiology
Male
Random Allocation
Reaction Time
Reinforcement (Psychology)

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