| Popis: |
When interpreting and imitating an action sequence the salience of its units is an important part of determining its parts. In interactions with children, parents naturally engage in 'motion ease' and exaggerate toy movements to make them more salient. Likewise, salience of goals influences whether children imitate or predict these parts of an action (Heinrichs, et al., 2012; Elsner & Pfeiffer, 2012; Adam et al., 2016; Trouillet et al., submitted). However, an increasing body of literature has suggested that learning is boosted by variance in stimuli, rather than salience on its own. For example, Meyer et al. (2021) found that action movements varying in amplitude lead to higher activation in the theta band for variable actions, as opposed to actions with small or large amplitudes. These findings appeal to curiosity driven learning in the action domain. Meyer et al., have used a simple stacking game and assessed first touch and success for some of the movements. For our current study, we would like to investigate the effects of salience vs. curiosity-enhancing action demonstrations using a previously established paradigm in which 18m-old children systematically ignore parts of an action sequence. When presented with an action sequence of a toy animal hopping or sliding into a toy house, 18m-old children tend to imitate only outcome of the action, but not its manner (Carpenter et al., 2005). This effect is more salient for the sliding over the hopping actions, indicating differences in the perception or perceived relevance of these two manner types. However, when presented with the manner on its own, without a clear outcome, children are able to imitate the manner to a similar extent (Carpenter et al., 2005). Likewise, telling children about the outcome before demonstrating the action sequence also boosts imitation of manner (Southgate et al., 2005) and segmenting the two action units using gaze and infant-directed speech also boosts imitation for the less salient sliding action (Kliesch et al., 2021). The salience of the goal also affects children's imitation of outcome and manner, i.e. whether the goal is represented by a 3D house, a drawing or is not indicated at all (Trouillet et al., submitted). In the current study we wanted to investigate whether the salience of the action's manner also contributes to the imitation of the action. We manipulated the salience of the manner by presenting the hopping and sliding motions using small or large movement trajectories. To control the trajectories and increase the movements' comparability, we changed the sliding action to a zig-zag line and presented both actions using the same number of zig-zags and hops. Additionally, we included a third condition, in which half of the movements within a trial used large and the other half small trajectories, thereby potentially appealing to children's curiosity-driven action learning. The current study is part of a set of two studies that share the same methodology and data. Both investigate the effects of curiosity. Whilst this study is looking at curiosity-inducing action demonstrations, the other study in investigates children's prior toy preferences. |
