Nameera Akhtar: UCSC Department of Psychology

Parents and researchers in Western middle-class societies emphasize dyadic interactions and teaching children new skills directly. This emphasis obscures the fact that young children can learn much through observation of others’ interactions. I will describe the results of several recent studies of young children’s learning from third-party interactions. Some of the studies examine learning novel words through overhearing others involve the learning of novel actions (imitative learning). The findings indicate that learning from third-party interactions is a robust skill seen in children as young as 18 months, and suggest that this type of learning may rely on emerging social-cognitive skills that enable the child to imagine herself in the third-party interaction.