title: Fourteen-month-old infants copy an action style accompanied by social-emotional cues.
abstract: Human adults exaggerate their actions and facial expressions when interacting with infants. These infant-directed modifications highlight certain aspects of action sequences and attract infants' attention. This study investigated whether social-emotional aspects of infant-directed modifications, such as smiling, eye contact, and onomatopoeic vocalization, influence infants' copying of another's action, especially action style, during the process of achieving an outcome. In Study 1, 14-month-old infants (n = 22) saw an experimenter demonstrate goal-directed actions in an exaggerated manner. Either the style or the end state of the actions was accompanied by social-emotional cues from the experimenter. Infants copied the style of the action more often when social-emotional cues accompanied the style than when they accompanied the end state. In Study 2, a different group of 14-month-old infants (n = 22) watched the same exaggerated actions as in Study 1, except that either the style or the end state was accompanied by a physical sound instead of social-emotional cues. The infants copied the end state consistently more often than the style. Taken together, these two studies showed that accompanying social-emotional cues provided by a demonstrator, but not accompanying physical sound, increased infants' copying of action style. These findings suggest that social-emotional cues facilitate efficient social learning through the adult-infant interaction.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Japan. Electronic address: fukuyamashirohi@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Fukuyama
authors.forename: Masako
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Myowa-Yamakoshi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: Eye-contact; Imitation; Infancy; Infant-directed modifications; Smiling; Vocalization