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Deferred Imitation Tasks

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Another method of studying infants’ capacities for mental representation relies on deferred imitation, the ability to repeat an act performed some time ago. Piaget (1962) believed that infants under 18 months cannot engage in deferred imitation because they lack mental representation abilities. Yet laboratory research on infant facial imitation has found that 6-week-old infants who watch an unfamiliar adult’s facial expression will imitate it when they see the same adult the next day (Meltzoff & Moore, 1994). Six- and 9-month-old infants also display deferred imitation of unique actions performed with toys, such taking a puppet’s glove off, shaking it to ring a bell inside, and replacing it over a 24-hour delay (Barr, Marrott, & Rovee-Collier, 2003).

When infants engage in deferred imitation, they act on the basis of stored representations of actions—memories—a contradiction of Piaget’s beliefs about infants’ capabilities (Jones & Herbert, 2006). Many researchers now suggest that deferred imitation, along with object permanence itself, is better viewed as a continuously developing ability rather than the stage-like shift in representational capacities that Piaget proposed (Miller, 2016).

For example, a 3-year longitudinal study of infants 12, 18, and 24 months old showed that performance on deferred imitation tasks improved throughout the second year of life (Kolling, Goertz, Stefanie, & Knopf, 2010). Between 12 and 18 months, infants remember modeled behaviors for several months and imitate peers as well as adults (Hayne, Boniface, & Barr, 2000). They also imitate across contexts, imitating behaviors that they learn in child care at home (Patel, Gaylord, & Fagen, 2013).

Increases in imitative capacity are observed with development up to 30 months of age. In addition, imitative capacity increases when shorter sequences of action are used, for example, a sequence of fewer than eight unique actions (Kolling, Goertz, Stefanie, & Knopf, 2010; Kressley-Mba et al., 2005). Furthermore, research following infants from 9 to 14 months of age suggests that individual differences in imitation are stable; children who show lower levels of imitation at 9 months of age continue to score lower on imitation at 14 months (Heimann & Meltzoff, 1996). These gradual changes suggest that infants and toddlers increase their representational capacities in a continuous developmental progression.

Lifespan Development

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