Automatic imitation in school-aged children

Children imitate others for different reasons: To learn from others and to reach social goals such as affiliation or prosociality. So far, imitative acts have been measured using diverging methods in children and adults. Here, we investigated whether school-aged children's imitation can be measured via their automatic imitation with a classical imitation-inhibition task (Brass et al., 2000) as has been used in adults. To this end, we measured automatic imitation in N = 94 7-8-year-olds and N = 10 adults. The results were similar in children and adults: Observing actions that are incongruent with participants' actions interferes with their responses resulting in increased reaction times and error rates. This shows that assessing automatic imitation via the imitation-inhibition task is feasible in children, and creates the basis for future studies to compare the behaviour of different age groups with the same imitation task.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The study found that automatic imitation in school-aged children can be measured using the imitation-inhibition task, similar to adults. Observing actions incongruent with one's own actions interferes with responses, leading to increased reaction times and error rates.