Study ongoing features of overimitation.

[Jim]

I wonder if children will imitate the unnecessary actions of a confident confederate of the same age who demonstrates opening the box to children who have yet to try. I think it would be interesting to conduct the study with varied levels of relationships to the children, such as, older sister, younger sister, brother, friend, etc.

Also I wonder how long the overimitation holds over continued repetition of the task. Will the child eventually opt for efficiency after repeated tasking? Could, after becoming accostumed to the task, the overimitations become extinct through additional encouragement, peer observation, requests to the child for different ways to do the task?

My spidy sense on the issue is that the initiation of a new task produces a natural reluctance to deviate from demonstrated ways until sufficient confidence in the task is gained and opens new pathways of actions toward efficiency or other desired outcomes.

Also, in studying the process of making art, it is well known that we see according to a patterned process that dictates the details we mimic. Usually, it's more a lack of details that we mimic, so that when we draw or imitate we only replicate hard images that we have retained in our conscious thinking. I could be that the overimitation of actions registers more vividly than the necessary processes because of their incongruence with the task, illuminating in the memory a means of numbering the tasks for replication. That is, could it be that the unnecessary actions act as counters for remembering the sequence, especially, since they are so noticable?

Could it be possible also that the visual cortex is the most powerful memorizer of the brain? And that what we see trumps what we experience with the other senses? It would make sense evolutionally, for what we hear and don't see is less of a threat or is less accessible than what we see. The same for smell and taste.

Though taste and feel are more immediate in spacial relation, most of what we feel and taste must pass the visual acid test. So visual memory would dictate what we regard safe or necessary, even though intellectually we may reason that some things are not necessary, when something we see is new, experience tells us that there may be hidden features in the object that are not visible, therefore, following visible clues will help us to hone in on what is necessary after repetition develops a better familiarity.

We depend upon sight so much that one has to be trained to identify familiar objects through touch, smell, taste, etc. But when we see it, we know it--sort of.

So it really could just be that vision is the main, hardwired shiboleth that protects and assesses our potential interaction with a physical world.

Or maybe we just have fun doing silly things during mundane tasks.

Just some thoughts.

[Janet12]

Hi Jim,

Great post! I was wondering much the same thing that you ask about whether children would ever overimitate other children. Based on how hard my youngest daughter tries so hard to be like her older sister, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if the answer was yes. Maybe children would overimitate children even more than they do adults for that very reason, i.e. the added social desire to "be like" the child that they are copying.

On the other hand, I guess it's possible that children might see others their age as less likely to have useful insights into how things work, and so not overimitate for that reason.

Anyhow, it's surely an interesting question! I hope we'll be seeing more posts from you in the future.

~ Janet

[ArizonaMom]

I definitely know what you mean about siblings copying other siblings, Janet. I remember when I was growing up how much I idolized my older brothers and sisters, and I see the same thing now in my own kids. So I think I would guess that one child would overimitate another, provided of course that the child doing the learning was younger than the one doing the demonstrating. Kids are so sensitive to exact ages (being 5 is waaaay higher status than being 4, you know ) I bet that the younger/older relationship would be important.

[Jim]

It also would be interesting to see the results of a multi-cultural study.

Also, since American schools and many parents train their children for conformity (the latter for the most part inadvertently, I think) it would be interesting to see the result of children educated/trained in less conformity-based settings.

Thank you for the compliments on my post. I love to watch and learn from my grandchildren and their parents. I have discovered so many things from Penelope, my first grandchild.