| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 心理學系 === 105 === The goal-directed theory of imitation claims that infants imitate an action by decomposing it into separate and hierarchically organized goals. When resources are limited, infants ignore less important goals to reproduce main goals. The evidence of this theory is that infants prefer to imitate action outcomes over styles when an external goal was present. In contrast, infants take action styles as major goals when there was no observable outcome. In this research, we investigated how movement direction and verbal information influence the goal-directed imitation process. In Experiment 1, we replicated the goal-choice imitation task used in previous research. 18-month-old infants observed an adult moving a toy animal in different action styles (slide or hop) into one of the two boxes (box condition) or onto the table (no-box condition).The results showed that infants imitated the action styles in no-box condition and matched the location choice in box condition. In Experiment 2, we modify the task by delaying the timing of movement direction cue for goal choice. Infants imitated the box choices less accurately after observing the modified demonstration. In Experiment 3, we verbalized the actor’s goal to investigate whether the goal choice errors in Experiment 2 are due to the lack of goal salience. We found no increase for the accuracy of matching location in the box condition but a decrease for the imitation of action styles in the no-box condition. In addition to the tendency to imitate different goals in different conditions, the study suggests important roles of movement direction and verbal cues in infants’ goal-directed imitation.
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