Parental models and overimitation in 5-year-old children.

Abstract

Individuals often copy another's causally irrelevant actions despite their inefficiency toward goals. The present study investigated the influence of model familiarity on this behavior—known as “overimitation”—with a two-phase overimitation task. We tested whether 5-year-old Austrian children (N = 52, 28 males) would overimitate their parents more than a stranger when operating a novel puzzle box. First, an inefficient strategy was demonstrated by a parent (or stranger) before the child's first turn on the box; then, an efficient strategy was demonstrated by a stranger (or parent) before the child's second turn. Results showed that children who first saw their parent's inefficient strategy overimitated it slightly more than those who saw the stranger's. After the efficient demonstration, we observed a reduction in children's overimitation of their parent's (but not the stranger's) inefficient strategy. Comparisons to a no-model (baseline) condition revealed significantly higher overimitation scores for our parent-then-stranger and stranger-then-parent conditions in the first phase, but only for the stranger-then-parent condition in the second phase. We also observed children protesting against their parents’ efficient demonstration (in favor of the stranger's inefficient demonstration). These results suggest (a) that overimitation can occur in two ways (supporting a dual-process theory) and (b) that children selectively overimitate depending on model familiarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)