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Re-enactment of intended acts from a video presentation by 18- and 24-month-old children

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Abstract

We used the Re-enactment of intention paradigm to investigate whether children would re-enact what an adult intended to do in a video presentation as they do when presented with a live demonstration (Meltzoff in Dev Psychol 31(5):838–850, 1995). Unlike the 18-month-old infants studied by Meltzoff (Dev Psychol 31(5):838–850, 1995), the 18- and 24-month-olds in the current study did not frequently imitate unsuccessful goal-directed actions presented in a video model. Children who performed better in the task also tended to share more of their attention with the experimenter during co-viewing of the video. Performance on the Re-enactment of intention task was positively related to categorization score, an independent measure of cognitive functioning.

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Notes

  1. We noticed in a pilot study that children became bored while observing a video of an adult who watched an object for more than 10 s without doing anything else.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant to the first author from the Italian Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (programma PRIN 2008N9KF5K). Portions of this research were presented at the 15th European Conference on Developmental Psychology (Bergen, Norway, August 2011). We thank Diane Poulin-Dubois for helpful suggestions on a previous draft of the manuscript. We are grateful to parents and children who participated in this study and to the directors and all the staff of the daycares in Rome where children were recruited (Baby 2000, Castello, Cocco e Drilli, La Farfalla, Luba 1, Luba 2, Piccolo Pinocchio, Pinocchio, Principe Ranocchio, Sophia). We dedicate this article in memoriam to Professor Maria D’Alessio who very much encouraged us to pursue this study.

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  1. Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Francesca Bellagamba, Fiorenzo Laghi, Antonia Lonigro & Cecilia Serena Pace

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  1. Francesca Bellagamba
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  2. Fiorenzo Laghi
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  3. Antonia Lonigro
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  4. Cecilia Serena Pace
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Correspondence to Francesca Bellagamba.

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Bellagamba, F., Laghi, F., Lonigro, A. et al. Re-enactment of intended acts from a video presentation by 18- and 24-month-old children. Cogn Process 13, 381–386 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0518-0

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