Imitative behavior in preschool children

The concept of imitation is of direct interest to psychologists in several areas. Behavior which is patterned after a model set by some external figure constitutes a notable portion of human activity and operates as a critical mechanism in certain complex behavior. The present study is designed to explore some potential sources of interindividual variance in the experimental learning of imitative behavior. The basic laboratory study here involved a training series in which an experimental subject (the follower or dependent subject) was taught to imitate, that is, to make the same choice in a two-choice discrimination learning problem made by an adult (the leader) immediately preceding the subject. Experimental subjects for this study were 32 children between the ages of 45 and 67 months with a mean age of 54.6 mo. Exploration of child rearing antecedents revealed a general pattern of relationships to imitative behavior in the child. The techniques employed here for assessing parental attitudes and practices yield highly variable and probably contaminated measures, but there is some consistency among the observed relationships between laboratory behavior and both parental attitudes and reported maternal practices. The differences in prediction of behavior for male and female subjects using the child rearing measures employed here are curious. In general, it appears that fairly simple and direct relationships obtain for females but not for males. While the major contribution of the present findings concerns the importance of two general areas of parent-child interaction in determining the tendency for young children to imitate adults, there were other important findings which should offer some guidance in further exploration of the relationships between parent-child interaction and the acquisition of techniques for independent behavior during the course of the child's social development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)