Infants prefer to imitate a reliable person

Research has shown that preschoolers prefer to learn from individuals who are a reliable source of information. The current study examined whether the past reliability of a person's emotional signals influences infants’ willingness to imitate that person. An emotional referencing task was first administered to infants in order to demonstrate the experimenter's credibility or lack thereof. Next, infants in both conditions watched as the same experimenter turned on a touch light using her forehead. Infants were then given the opportunity to reproduce this novel action. As expected, infants in the unreliable condition developed the expectation that the person's emotional cues were misleading. Thus, these infants were subsequently more likely to use their hands than their foreheads when attempting to turn on the light. In contrast, infants in the reliable group were more likely to imitate the experimenter's action using their foreheads. These results suggest that the reliability of the model influences infants’ imitation.

Research highlights
► Infants can develop expectation that a person's emotional cues are misleading in an emotional referencing task.
► Infants as young as 14 months are selective imitators.
► Infants aged 14 months imitate a reliable model but emulate an unreliable model.