Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Imitation plays a key role in learning cultural knowledge. Young children imitate human models as well as humanoidrobots, even when their actions are clearly non-functional to achieve a given goal. This so-called overimitation is possiblymotivated by the desire to socially affiliate. This study clarifies the impact of social cues (greeting, eyes, friendly voice)and smooth, dynamic body motion of humanoid robots on rates of overimitation. In one condition, we remove all socialcues. In another condition, we change the dynamics of robot movement to be less biological. Overimitation rates will becompared across all three conditions (social & biological, non-social & biological, non-social & non-biological) to learnmore about important model characteristics that support cultural learning. Children aged 5-6 participated in this study. Wediscuss results and implications for using humanoid robots in interactive settings with children.