Young children use imitation communicatively.

There is growing evidence that children imitate not just to learn from others but also to affiliate socially with them. However, although imitation can convey a wealth of affiliative information to others, it is not yet known whether imitators intend for this to be the case. In particular, we do not know whether children imitate communicatively in some contexts, expending extra effort to make sure that the demonstrator sees their imitation.

If you presume relevance, you don't need a bifocal lens.

We argue for a relevance-guided learning mechanism to account for both innovative reproduction and faithful imitation by focusing on the role of communication in knowledge transmission. Unlike bifocal stance theory, this mechanism does not require a strict divide between instrumental and ritual-like actions, and the goals they respectively fulfill (material vs. social/affiliative), to account for flexibility in action interpretation and reproduction.

Acquiring sub-efficient and efficient variants of novel means by integrating information from multiple social models in preschoolers.

Sub-efficient action routines often represent culture-specific conventional forms of actions that belong to the repertoire of cultural knowledge shared by a social group. Children readily acquire such sub-efficient routines from social demonstrations and often preserve them in their action repertoire despite encountering more efficient alternatives. This suggests that they can treat sub-efficient conventional forms and their efficient alternatives in a context-sensitive selective manner.