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The social motivation for social learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2008

Mark Nielsen
Mark Nielsen
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane QLD 4072, Australia. [email protected]://www.psy.uq.edu.au/people/personal.html?id=636
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Abstract

Through the second year, children's copying behaviour shifts from a focus on emulating to a focus on imitating. This shift can be explained by a change in focus from copying others to satisfy cognitive motivations to copying in order to satisfy social motivations. As elegant and detailed as the shared circuits model (SCM) is, it misses this crucial, motivation-based feature of imitation.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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