| Popis: |
Children are not just passive recipients that take in information from the environment indiscriminately, but they are active participants in the learning process. They are actively choosing what sources of information they want to attend to and what to learn about. One area where this becomes evident is curiosity-driven learning based on children's toy preferences. Ackermann et al. (2019) found that 2 year-old children are better at learning new object-word combinations if they are interested in the objects' category. In the current study we want to investigate whether children's object preference also helps them to learn novel actions at 18 months of age. For this, we show them a short action sequence of a toy being hopped/slid into a toy house using both, wooden cars and stuffed plush animals. Previous research has shown that children at this age tend to ignore the manner of the movement, i.e. whether the object was hopped or slid (Carpenter et al., 2005; Southgate et al., 2009; Kliesch et al., 2021). We predict that children that prefer playing with one type of object are also more likely to imitate the manner of the action compared to children who do not. |
