The following thesis examines factors that affect children’s imitation, and presents evidence that imitation is a composite ability which involves multiple mechanisms developing throughout childhood. In Chapter 1 previous findings are reviewed to highlight the mechanisms underlying the ability to reproduce other people’s actions. The evidence suggests that imitation, whilst based on basic action control mechanisms in infancy, is also affected by higher-order cognitive processes in later childhood. Previous literature is still unclear on how the influence of such processes changes at different ages. Chapter 2 used a successive-models task with children aged 2 to 12 years to reveal how children’s imitation changes with age. Results showed that whilst children under the age of 5 years did not imitate deviant models as much as the first model, children above the age of 6 years begin to copy multiple models faithfully, particularly after the age of 10 years. Chapter 3 investigated the role of multiple factors that may have made children under the age of 5 years imitate deviant models less than the original model. In particular, it was found that model evaluations, object associations, and motor inhibitory skills all affect children’s imitation of multiple models. These findings support the interpretation that imitation requires different abilities depending on the type of action that is being imitated. Chapter 4 shows that children’s imitation also depends on the type of goal that they associate with the action. By pre-school age children will imitate actions faithfully if they believe that the goal of the action was the movement itself. The results of the thesis support the idea that imitation, while involving general processes of action control, is also affected in a top-down manner by higher-order cognitive abilities after infancy.

The evolutionary success of our species is bound to our sociality—the tendency to engage in and benefit from social interactions. On a conceptual level, this sociality has been parsed into two facets, namely the proclivity to like and seek social interactions (social motivation) as well as the cognitive abilities needed to coordinate with others socially (social cognition). While numerous studies have assessed social motivation and social cognition in young children, our current understanding of both facets is still far from conclusive. First, the exact ontogeny of social motivation and cognition remains largely unclear. Second, the degree to which either facet of sociality is shaped by cultural input remains poorly understood. Finally, interindividual variation in social motivation and cognition has yet to be examined, without which we can neither understand the construct validity of either facet, nor their potential interplay. In this dissertation, I present three studies addressing these issues by focusing on developmental, cross-cultural, and interindividual variation in three phenomena previously linked to sociality: Overimitation and collaboration as indicators of social motivation, as well as Theory of Mind as a proxy for social cognition. In the first study I assessed whether children’s overimitation would be shaped by age, culture, and the social presence of an adult model. I found that children across three diverse populations showed more overimitation with age and selectively in the presence of the model. I also documented cross-cultural variation in children’s overimitation. On an individual level, children’s overimitation did not predict their tendency to reengage a co-player in a collaborative activity. In study 2, I found children’s overimitation to vary systematically between two populations utilizing a procedure with reduced cognitive task demands. Here, age did not predict children’s overimitation and variation across populations was only observed in how much, but not whether, children would overimitate. In study 3, I documented systematic variation in children’s social motivation for collaboration as well as their Theory of Mind across three populations and across the age range tested. On an individual level, indicators of social motivation were ontogenetically linked and predicted children’s Theory of Mind. In the general discussion, I propose an integrative model of social motivation and cognition to embed and expand the current findings. Accordingly, the interplay of socialization goals and practices, social motivation, and social cognition builds the foundation for children’s social learning within social interactions.

Com maiores publicações no início do século XXI, o tema superimitação, ou overimitation, tem despertado interesse de alguns psicólogos e biólogos por se tratar de um possível mecanismo social que leva os humanos a copiarem comportamentos irrelevantes na resolução de uma situação problema a partir de um modelo. Neste contexto, a presente dissertação de mestrado objetivou uma análise do comportamento de superimitação com mecanismos das funções executivas e cognição social de crianças da educação infantil, de 4 a 5 anos de idade. Participaram 36 crianças da educação infantil selecionadas de uma EMEI em São Paulo, segundo critérios pré-estabelecidos, avaliadas com os testes: superimitação (resolução da caixa problemas), teoria da mente - ToM (teste de falsa crença), testes para funções executivas de memória operacional (Missing Test), flexibilidade mental (DCCS), e raciocínio lógico (Teste de Matrizes Coloridas Progressivas de Raven). Os resultados indicaram que a superimitação não apresentou correlação com as funções executivas examinadas. Foram verificados indícios de tratar-se de uma atividade social, por consequência da associação com a função de teoria da mente, em detrimento a uma atividade isolada de resolução de problema cognitivo / Having experienced a growth in number of studies at the beginning of the 21st century, the subject of overimitation has caught the interest of psychologists and biologists in referring to a possible social mechanism that makes humans copy irrelevant behavior during the resolution of problem situations from a model. In that context, the present dissertation has as its objective an analysis of the overimitation behavior in relation to executive function and social cognition mechanisms in preschool children, 4 to 5 years of age. Thirty-six children participated in the study. They wereselected from a public municipal school (EMEI) in São Paulo, Brazil, according to preestablished criteria and evaluated using the problem box resolution task (overimitation), false belief test (ToM), and tests for executive functions of working memory (Missing Test), mental flexibility (DCCS), and logical thinking (Ravens Progressive Matrices Test). The results indicate that overimitation presented no significant correlation to executive functions. The findings provide evidence that overimitation is a result of social activity, since it showed possible association to theory of mind, instead of signs of an isolated activity cognitive problem solving