title: Rethinking 'rational imitation' in 14-month-old infants: a perceptual distraction approach.
abstract: In their widely noticed study, Gergely, Bekkering, and Király (2002) showed that 14-month-old infants imitated an unusual action only if the model freely chose to perform this action and not if the choice of the action could be ascribed to external constraints. They attributed this kind of selective imitation to the infants' capacity of understanding the principle of rational action. In the current paper, we present evidence that a simpler approach of perceptual distraction may be more appropriate to explain their results. When we manipulated the saliency of context stimuli in the two original conditions, the results were exactly opposite to what rational imitation predicts. Based on these findings, we reject the claim that the notion of rational action plays a key role in selective imitation in 14-month-olds.
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. mbeisert@cbs.mpg.de
authors.forename: Miriam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Beisert
authors.forename: Norbert
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zmyj
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Liepelt
authors.forename: Franziska
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Jung
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Prinz
authors.forename: Moritz M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Daum
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D007223:Infant; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*