Reading of social cues by children changes age

According to a new Cornell research, children use social cues to discover which actions are important but older children don`t necessarily use these. This study proves that different aged children have different expectations whenever they learn something new from adults. The authors of the study are Yue Yu, graduate student in the field of human development and Tamar Kushnir, the Evalyn Edwards Milman Assistant Professor of Child Development in the College of Human Ecology. The results are published in Developmental Psychology. “Understanding what causes children to imitate in any given situation, and especially to imitate actions that seem to have no obvious purpose, sheds light on how children's minds work and what influences their learning”, Kushnir said. In order to find out how children`s imitation behavior is influenced by social context and age, the team of researchers involved in this study children aged between 2 and 4 years. They were required to play certain games and imitate actions. The final results prove that 4 year-old children were predisposed to faithfully imitate both necessary and unnecessary a actions, while 2 year-old kids rater chose to imitate unnecessary actions.