Recent empirical investigations have concentrated primarily on studying imitation as a social
tool that satisfies social motivations, while other potential reasons for and forms of imitation …

Debates concerning social learning in the behavioral and the developmental cognitive
sciences have largely ignored the literature on social influence in the affective sciences …

Individuals often copy another's causally irrelevant actions despite their inefficiency toward
goals. The present study investigated the influence of model familiarity on this behavior …

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things,
puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult …

Overimitation—the copying of another's unnecessary or irrelevant actions toward a goal—is
largely considered to be uniquely human. Recent studies, however, have found evidence of …

Two social learning strategies that develop rapidly during the preschool period are selective
trust and overimitation. To our knowledge, no study has directly compared performance on …

Children imitate actions that are perceivably unnecessary to achieve the instrumental goal of
an action sequence, a behavior termed over-imitation. It is debated whether this behavior is …

Domestic dogs have been shown to copy their caregiver's actions, including ones which are
causally-irrelevant to a physical goal—a behaviour called “overimitation”. In a new …

Children selectively imitate in‐group over outgroup individuals under certain experimental
conditions. We investigated whether this bias applies to gender in‐groups in China. Three …

Children are strong imitators, which sometimes leads to overimitation of causally
unnecessary actions. Here, we tested whether learning from a peer decreases this …