Paper published‼️ "15-month-olds’ understanding of imitation in social and instrumental contexts" 🚼 by Shannon Yasuda, Wenjie Li, Deisy Martinez, @brendenlake.bsky.social, and me in @infantstudies.bsky.social!
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Hi prof Molly❤️
My kids are afraid & hungry💔
They ask me,"Mom,why can't we have fun on Eid and live in peace?😭
Why are we deprived of our childhood and constantly displaced? 💔
What is our fault?"😔
Plz give my kids gifts for Eid to buy them food and bread😭
I’m shy of you, but the prices are very high💔
From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. 👯♀️ In this paper, we asked what cues infants 👶 might use to infer that a social goal is driving an act of imitation.
To do so, we tested 15-month-olds' expectations about whether an imitator would approach the agent it imitated when that imitation occurred in the presence vs. absence of intentional cues like obstacles, object goals, and efficient, causally effective action.
We used highly minimal, procedurally generated displays to challenge infants' capacities for abstraction and to tightly match the displays across conditions. These displays can also be easily adapted to test computational models 💻 (keep an eye out for our future work!).
Infants expected an imitating agent to approach a target agent only when the imitator did not also have an object goal. Infants’ attribution of social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans’ early understanding of imitation.
A systematic evaluation of a set of scenarios like these is possible and promises to inform our understanding of the foundational knowledge on which human social learning is built 👩🏫, as well as to aid the building of human-like artificial intelligence 🤖.
Congratulations 🎉 to Shannon, for whom this is her first, first-author paper 📕, and to Deisy, who was an ICIS Founding Generation Fellow in the lab and then our lab manager 👩💻! Finally, thank you to the NSF and DARPA for funding our work and to all of the families 👩👦 who volunteered to participate!
Comments
My kids are afraid & hungry💔
They ask me,"Mom,why can't we have fun on Eid and live in peace?😭
Why are we deprived of our childhood and constantly displaced? 💔
What is our fault?"😔
Plz give my kids gifts for Eid to buy them food and bread😭
I’m shy of you, but the prices are very high💔