Fun or Function:What motivates preschoolers to overimitate in playful vs. instrumental task settings?

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Young children acquire many cultural skills via observing and imitating others. They copy even actions that are clearly not relevant to attain a given goal, a phenomenon called overimitation (OI). Different motivations guiding children imitation behavior have been suggested in the literature: If children imitate actions to accomplish a given task they act based on an instrumental motivation. If they try to affiliate with the model or follow social norms/conventions, they do so based on a social motivation. Recently, Schleihauf (2018) suggested a third possibility: If children imitate because they enjoy the demonstrated actions, they actions may be based on an entertainment motivation. Studies on the impact of the entertainment motivation are still missing, however. The present project will fill this gap by conducting three related studies following the same general paradigm: 5-year-olds will be asked to retrieve a coin from a box with a transparent lid. A model demonstrates a range of inefficient actions (e.g. knocking on the lid, pulling on a knob) before showing the efficient actions (i.e. lifting the lid and reaching inside the box to grab the coin). Then it is the child’s turn to get a coin however she likes. A baseline study without demonstration (Study 1; N = 32) assesses how often children show each target action spontaneously. It serves to identify over-imitation in further studies. Study 2 (N = 128) manipulates children’s motivation via priming activities and the mode of demonstration. First, the experimenter engages the child in either an entertaining or an instrumental activity (imaginative play vs. sorting things). In the following imitation task the critical actions are demonstrated either in an entertaining mode (i.e. to safe a pirate treasure), or in an instrumental mode (i.e. to solve a task). Study 3 (N = 128) varies the age of the model (peer or adult) and explores the role of children’s dispositional playfulness using a newly developed questionnaire. We expect that the motivation guiding children’s behavior during the imitation-test are affected by the situational framing provided. An entertaining primary activity and mode of demonstration are more likely to support over-imitation than an instrumental primary activity and mode of presentation. Furthermore, we expect that a child-model is more likely to increase over-imitation in an entertaining context whereas an adult-model is more likely to reduce over-imitation in an instrumental context. Finally, the role of dispositional playfulness for predicting over-imitation in different conditions will be explored. The present project shall help to shed first light on the role of the entertainment motivation for explaining over-imitation in preschoolers and to specify person-related and situation-related conditions triggering this kind of motivation in children.