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Imitation of novel gestures in
human infants. Mihela Erjavec, Pauline J. Horne and C. Fergus Lowe University of Wales, Wales This paper presents a brief theoretical overview of problems in research on imitation and discusses preliminary findings from an experimental programme designed to address these issues. Most behaviour analysts view generalised imitation as a higher-order behavioural class established in the course of early human social interaction. On the basis of the existing research literature, however, it is not clear how such learning is established. Because of the centrality of imitation in human learning, not least in the learning of verbal behaviour, this is a question that needs to be resolved. Our experimental studies have been conducted with infants ranging in age from 8 to 20 months, and were designed to investigate whether these very young children could imitate novel arbitrary actions that had not previously been directly trained as "matching" behaviour. In order to control to some extent for previous, and unknown, reinforcement histories we trained arbitrary gestures, rather than conventional actions on objects. First, selected gestures were trained that matched those produced by a model (the experimenter). We then tested to see whether novel behaviour emitted by the model would be imitated by the children. In some conditions, additional training techniques were used to ensure that the children could produce these behaviours non-imitatively; this was followed by further testing for imitation. The results will be discussed in the light of the theoretical issues raised earlier. Keywords: imitation, infants, higher order classes, verbal behaviour |
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