What Does It Take for an Infant to Learn How to Use a Tool by Observation?
Résumé
Observational learning is probably one of the most powerful factors determining
progress during child development. When learning a new skill, infants rely on their
own exploration; but they also frequently benefit from an adult’s verbal support or
from demonstration by an adult modeling the action. At what age and under what
conditions does adult demonstration really help the infant to learn a novel behavior?
In this review, we summarize recently published work we have conducted on the
acquisition of tool use during the second year of life. In particular, we consider under
what conditions and to what extent seeing a demonstration from an adult advances an
infant’s understanding of how to use a tool to obtain an out-of-reach object. Our results
show that classic demonstration starts being helpful at 18 months of age. When adults
explicitly show their intention prior to demonstration, even 16-month-old infants learn
from the demonstration. On the other hand, providing an explicit demonstration (“look at
how I do it”) is not very useful before infants are ready to succeed by themselves anyway.
In contrast, repeated observations of the required action in a social context, without
explicit reference to this action, considerably advances the age of success and the
usefulness of providing a demonstration. We also show that the effect of demonstration
can be enhanced if the demonstration makes the baby laugh. Taken together, the results
from this series of studies on observational learning of tool use in infants suggest,
first, that when observing a demonstration, infants do not know what to pay attention
to: demonstration must be accompanied by rich social cues to be effective; second,
infants’ attention is inhibited rather than enhanced by an explicit demand of “look at
what I do”; and finally a humorous situation considerably helps infants understand the
demonstration.
Origine : Publication financée par une institution