TY - JOUR T1 - Human infants’ understanding of social imitation: Inferences of affiliation from third party observations JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/050385 SP - 050385 AU - Lindsey J. Powell AU - Elizabeth S. Spelke Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/26/050385.abstract N2 - Imitation is ubiquitous in positive social interactions. For adult and child observers, it also supports inferences about the participants in such interactions and their social relationships, but the origins of these inferences are obscure. Do infants attach social significance to this form of interaction? Here we test 4- to 5.5-month-old infants’ interpretation of imitation by asking whether the imitative interactions they observe support inferences of social affiliation. Across 10 experimental conditions that varied the modality of the imitation (movement vs. sound), the roles of specific characters (imitators vs. targets), the number of characters in the displays (3 vs. 5), and the number of parties initiating affiliative test events (1 vs. 2), the research yielded three main findings. First, infants expect that characters who engaged in imitation will approach and affiliate with the characters whom they imitated. Second, infants show no evidence of expecting that characters who were targets of imitation will approach and affiliate with their imitators. Third, analyzing imitative interactions is difficult for young infants, whose expectations vary in strength depending on the number of characters to be tracked and the number of affiliative actors to be compared. These findings have implications for our understanding of social imitation, and they provide methods for advancing understanding of other aspects of early social cognitive development. ER -