Although Meltzoff (1995) pioneered a paradigm for studying the “theory-of-mind” questions in preverbal infants with the assistance of object-related imitation tasks, the social significance he assigned to the behavioural re-enactment procedure needs carefully checking. More important, there have been a few studies attempting to follow M eltzoff s Failed-Attempt paradigm (Aldridge, Stone, Sweeney, & Bower, 2000; Bellagamba & Tomasello, 1999; Call & Carpenter, 2000), however, there are virtually no studies aimed at assessing the adequacy of such a paradigm. The goals of the current studies are thus to explore the various methodological aspects of the Failed-Attempt paradigm.
Experiment 1 included 19-month-old infants and replicated three conditions of Meltzoff’s (1995) study—Demonstration (target). Demonstration (intention or failed attempt), and Control (adult manipulation). In addition, a novel condition of
Emulation Learning was designed as a control for the possibility that infants learned some affordances of objects during observation of the experimenter’s failed attempts and that led to their production of the target acts. In this novel condition, children were exposed to the initial and end states of the target display (e.g., the dumbbell split into two halves) but without watching the experimenter’s manipulations of the test objects (by using a screen) and then were invited to make the end results occur on their own. The critical question was whether children engaging in a kind of emulation process would produce the target acts as frequently as they did by observing the target or failed-attempt display.
Experiment 2 included 17-month-old infants and extended the design of Experiment 1 with the replacement of a new condition of Spatial Contiguity for the adult-manipulation control. The Spatial-Contiguity condition examined whether children’s performance on target acts after watching the failed-attempt display was based on observation of the particular transitional states that the individual parts of the objects were contiguous to each other (e.g., the square crossing the dowel, or the beads touching the rim of the cylinder). In this control condition, the experimenter merely introduced such transitional states in the demonstration without highlighting
all of the dynamic properties of the objects and thus produced neither target acts nor failed attempts. Children’s production of target acts after watching the spatia- contiguity display was assessed in terms of a stimulus enhancement effect from observing the individual parts of the objects adjoining each other.
In Experiments 1 and 2, the effect of the failed-attempt display on children’s production of target acts was more refined with the inclusion of two further experimental controls. These two studies provided an appropriate evaluation of Meltzoff’s Failed-Attempt paradigm by comparing the effects of emulation learning and stimulus enhancement. Also, the data established to what extent children observing the failed-attempt display would produce the target acts with an understanding of the intended consequences of the demonstrator. The data might give rise to a potential situation in which children observing the failed-attempt display brought about the target acts as frequently as they did in the Emulation- Learning and Spatial-Closeness controls, while children in these three groups produced the target acts less often than they did after watching the target display. In that case, children’s performance on target acts obtained using Meltzoff’s Failed- Attempt paradigm would be interpreted as a stimulus enhancement or emulation effect. However, what if that is due to their inability to read the demonstrator’s intended actions?
Experiment 3 replicated the design of Experiment 1, while two other samples of 28- and 40-month-old children participated in this study. As considered above, in case there is a chance that the inability to read intended acts would account for 19- and 17-month-olds’ performance on the target acts after watching the failed-attempt display in Experiments 1 and 2, would older children in the same circumstance be more successful in producing the target acts? That is, we have reason to believe that they ought to be more capable of understanding the intentions of others than 19- and
17-month-olds. Moreover, is there a possibility that older children are not as likely to produce the target acts after watching the failed-attempt demonstration as they are after watching the target demonstration? If so, would it imply that they were incapable of decoding the target acts underlying the failed attempts? Or, might the failed attempts demonstrated be insufficient to manifest the target acts as intended?
Would older and younger children interpret the failed-attempt scenario in different ways? This experiment posed straightforwardly the methodological question of whether the demonstrator in Meltzoff’s Failed-Attempt format can be comfortably justified in intending to achieve the target acts.
In Meltzoff’s script of the failed-attempt display, the demonstrator refrained from showing linguistic or facial expressions of failure. However, as pointed out in 1.4 of the present chapter, were it not for accidental events accounting for the failure to consummate the target acts, it might be the case that the demonstrator failed to produce the target acts on purpose. Experiment 4 incorporated two modifications into Meltzoff’s Failed-Attempt format. These modifications were based on the imitation paradigm of Tomasello and his colleagues (Tomasello & Barton, 1994; Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998). To ensure that children were not simply responding to the physical events, independent of the experimenter’s intended results, the demonstrated failed attempts were vocally marked as accidentally failed (“Oops!”) in one version and intentionally failed (“There!”) in the other. The question asked was whether children would be more successful in generating the target acts with the diminution of the likelihood that the demonstrator failed to accomplish these acts on purpose. On the other hand, it is interesting to see how children would respond to the demonstration of the intentionally failed attempts. Would they be more likely to copy the form of the failed acts?
In summary, the goals of the study are:
1. Overall, the study is aimed at examining the adequacy of Meltzoff’s Failed- Attempt paradigm as a basis for investigating the concept of intention in preverbal children.
2. Experiments 1 and 2 tested and established to what extent children’s
production of target acts in Meltzoff’s Failed-Attempt paradigm may belong to other categories of non-imitative learning by ruling out the possibilities of stimulus
enhancement and emulation learning effects.
3. Experiments 3 and 4 served as possible modifications of Meltzoff’s format so that the question of children’s understanding of intentional actions may be appropriately posed based on object-related imitation tasks.