THE ABILITY TO IMITATE IS AN IMPORTANT COGNITIVE ABILITY IN YOUNG CHILDREN, AND LEADS TO SYMBOLIC PLAY. THESE SKILLS DEVELOP IN STAGES AND ARE RELATED TO IMPORTANT FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS IN OTHER DEVELOPMENTAL AREAS, SUCH AS SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT, LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT, AND COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY AND CREATIVITY.

Children's ability to imitate (i.e. voluntarily match the actions of others) is an important mechanism for social learning and acquiring new knowledge.

Imitation is also a significant component of infants' social, cognitive, and language development. Even in the early months, imitation serves as a means for infants to engage in and sustain social interactions.

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2. Meltzoff A. N. (2007). The 'like me' framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica, 124(1), 26–43.

In the cognitive domain, qualitative changes in infants' imitation reflect their advancement in symbolic representational ability.

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3. Piaget, J. (1962b). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. New York, NY: Norton.

Furthermore, infants can employ imitation as a strategy for mastering new, culturally relevant behaviours, including language.

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4. Masur, E. F., & Rodemaker, J. E. (1999). Mothers’ and infants’ spontaneous vocal, verbal, and action imitation during the second year. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 45(3), 392–412.

In one study, newborns as young as 42 minutes old were found to match gestures shown to them, including tongue protrusion and mouth opening.

This is remarkable because newborns have never seen their own reflection in a mirror. Yet, they can map the behaviour of a person they observe and produce the same actions. Neuroscience findings have indeed shown that when babies see others produce actions with a particular body part, their brains are activated in a corresponding way.

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2. Meltzoff A. N. (2007). The 'like me' framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica, 124(1), 26–43.

However, more recent studies have also found that babies learnt how to imitate only within their first month of birth. In a study of infants at one, two, six, and nine weeks of age, researchers found that they did not imitate any of the behaviours they observed. In response to the grownups they saw, they were just as likely to produce a different gesture as they were to produce a matching one.

The findings now suggest that imitation is not an innate behaviour but one that is learnt in babies' first months. One possibility is that babies learn to imitate other people by watching other people imitate them. Another study from the same lab found that parents imitate their babies once every two minutes on average. Hence, this could be a powerful means by which infants learn to link their gestures with those of another person.

Imitation skills enable babies to share attention (joint-attention skills) on an event, which builds cognitive skills. Babies should be able to imitate what an adult does by 6 to 8 months. Studies have found that infants who are later diagnosed with autism experience considerable delays in developing imitation and play skills as early as 9 to 12 months of age, and that although these skills improve over time, they do so at a slow rate.

A study of children with autism spectrum disorders also showed that three key behaviours – joint attention, imitation, and object play - play an important role in predicting later communication and intellectual outcomes in children with autism spectrum disorders by nine to twelve months of age. Hence, helping any children develop imitation skills would help their future development.

Moving from imitation to symbolic play: Play starts “primitively” as sensorimotor play before one to two years, with an exploration of properties and functions of objects and imitation. Towards the end of this stage, children may imitate actions they have observed in adults, like bringing a toy cup to their mouths, but most of the time, objects are still used for their intended purposes.

Between the ages of one and two, symbolic or pretend play replaces sensorimotor play. True symbolic thought emerges around 18 months of age with children’s ability to think in images and symbols.

This later results in children being able to carry out symbolic play.

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3. Piaget, J. (1962b). Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood. New York, NY: Norton.

Symbolic play, also known as pretend play, is the ability to use objects, actions or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas during play. Before the symbolic play level of development, a box is a box. After a child has developed symbolic play abilities, a box can be a phone or anything the child imagines it to be. Infants reach the pre-symbolic level between eight and eleven months of age, and the first milestone of symbolic play is typically evident at around eleven to twelve months of age.

Symbolic play has sparked the interest of cognitive scientists because of its potential importance in children’s cognitive development, such as the development of cognitive flexibility and creativity.

Symbolic play has also been linked to emotional development

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12. Jent, J. F., Niec, L. N., & Baker, S. E. (2011). Play and interpersonal processes. In Russ, S. W., & Niec, L. N. (Eds.), Play in clinical practice: Evidence-based approaches (pp. 23–47). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

and language development. Object substitutions in play (e.g. using a box as a car) are strongly linked to language learning, and their absence is a diagnostic marker of language delay.

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14. Smith, L. B., & Jones, S. S. (2011). Symbolic play connects to language through visual object recognition. Developmental Science, 14(5), 1142–1149.

Researchers have noted correlations between various forms of symbolic play and children’s understanding of others’ minds.

They found that the emergence of ‘cooperative pretend play’ (i.e. pretend play with playmates) at the age of two facilitates the development of the child’s ability to take the perspective of another person, also known as "Theory of Mind”.

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16. Semeijn, M. (2019). Interacting with Fictions: The Role of Pretend Play in Theory of Mind Acquisition. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 10, 113–132.

In the contents of symbolic play, a child reflects different social situations, such as family relationships, shopping, and working adults, in a creative way. This contributes to the adoption of gender roles, learning the rules, socialisation, mastering the child's culture, understanding and adopting some higher emotions, overcoming egocentrism, and moving away from the present situation.

Hence, adults can use symbolic play settings to support the transmission of values and help children learn social-emotional skills.

Studies have found that early pretend play predicts later divergent thinking and may correlate to later academic performance. A four-year longitudinal study of 61 students in a private school for girls in kindergarten through fourth grade found that pretend play predicted more divergent thinking in the children. Children whose pretend play was more imaginative and organised generated more alternate uses for common objects. Positive affect in play predicted originality of responses. In addition, both pretend play and divergent thinking predicted girls’ mathematics achievement longitudinally.