Infants expected an imitating agent to approach a target agent only when the imitator did not also have an object goal. Infants’ attribution of social value to imitation only in the absence of such intentional cues may be a signature of humans’ early understanding of imitation.

We used highly minimal, procedurally generated displays to challenge infants' capacities for abstraction and to tightly match the displays across conditions. These displays can also be easily adapted to test computational models 💻 (keep an eye out for our future work!).

To dissociate specific object and place information from more general figure and ground information, moreover, participants either saw scenes with both place information (a room) and object information (a block in the room), or scenes with two kinds of object information.

Toddlers were shown silent, animated videos presenting simple shapes interacting in a grid world. They were tested on their expectations of agents' affiliations after imitative actions with or without obstacles and goals. 4/6