Excessive Imitative Behavior And Its Influencing Factors In Children With Intellectual Disabilities

Imitation mainly refers to the process in which an individual consciously or unconsciously repeats the behavior of another person and is one of the important forms of social learning.For children,the formation and development of their movements,language,skills,behavioral habits,and quality are all inseparable from imitation.Imitation can be divided into selective imitation and over-imitation.Selective imitation refers to the fact that children will take into account information such as the environment and the presenter's intention when imitating,and thus decide which actions to imitate;The act of imitating actions that have nothing to do with tasks is called over-imitation.This article focuses on the over-imitation of children with intellectual disabilities.The study included 66 children with moderate mental retardation,including 21 children with autism,20 children with Down syndrome,and 25 children with non-specific mental retardation.Using experimental methods,under the guidance of normative learning theory and social affiliation theory,we studied the over-imitation of children with different types of mental retardation and the influence of normative and demonstrative factors on over-imitation.The conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)In general,the over-imitation behaviors of children with mental retardation differ significantly in age,and they tend to increase first and then decrease.Between7-9 and 10-12 years of age,over-imitation has gradually increased.10-12 years of age at the peak of development,between 10-12 and 13-15 years of age,over-imitation began to gradually decline.The over-imitation of 10-12 year olds was significantly more than the other two ages.(2)Children with different types of mental retardation had significant differences in over-imitation behaviors.Children with autism had significantly lower imitation scores than those with Down's children and non-specific mixed children.There was no significant difference between Down's children and mixed children's scores.(3)In general,the motivation of observing the norms has a significant impact on the over-imitation behaviors of children with intellectual disabilities.The children with mental retardation in the low-motivated group have significantly less over-imitation behavior than the high-motivation group.The interaction between the subjects type and the experimental treatment was significant.There was no significant difference in the over-imitation behavior of the autistic and mixed groups of children in the high and low motivation groups.The over-imitation behaviors of the Down's children in the high and low motivation groups were significantly different.The over-imitation of the high-motivation group was significantly more than that of the low-motivation group.The interaction between age and experimental treatment was not significant.(4)On the whole,the demonstrator factor have a significant impact on the imitation of unrelated tools for children with intellectual disabilities,and have no significant effect on imitation of unrelated behaviors.Experimentally scenario 2(demonstrator demonstrating only effective behavior are present)significantly less than experimental scenario 1(two demonstrators demonstrated irrelevant and effective behavior,any one present)and experimental context 3(demonstrator demonstrating unrelated behavior are present).There were no significant differences in the scores of the unrelated tools for experimental scenario 1 and experimental scenario 3.There was no significant interaction between the three experimental scenarios and the type of subjects tested.