When children see another person modelling an action that is causally irrelevant for achieving a given goal, they quite reliably imitate this action - they overimitate. However, to date, little is known about whether non-functional, non-normative or counter-intuitive action demonstrations elicit imitation in young children to the same extent, and whether age-related changes are similar across different task-settings.
Four-to-seven-year-olds (N = 80) took part in three different tasks. Task 1 (jar-task) resembled a typical overimitation experiment – a model demonstrated an action sequence, consisting of functional and non-functional action steps to retrieve a cookie from a jar. In Task 2 (picture task), participants observed the model coloring a picture of natural objects with wrong (unnatural) colors (e.g., blue for an apple), thus demonstrating non-normative behavior. In Task 3 (tower-task), the model expressed the wish to build a high tower from tissue-bags, but placed the bags next to each other, thus building a broad but not a high tower. In contrast to a baseline control condition (N = 28), which did not include any previous demonstration, children in the main study revealed imitation in all three tasks. Results show that the imitation rate was higher when the model demonstrated non-functional actions compared to non-normative or counter-intuitive actions. A positive age effect was found for the jar-task: the imitation of nun-functional actions increased with age. Interestingly, an opposite effect was observed for the other two tasks where younger children revealed more imitation of non-normative and counter-intuitive actions than older ones did.