ABSTRACT
There is near-universal acceptance of the view that imitative processes play an important role in the early cognitive and social development of the child. There is also an increasing consensus that the developmental course of imitation in infancy needs further empirical investigation. The deferred imitation task involved a 24-hour delay between the modeling and response periods. Most recent studies of infant imitation have focused on tasks in which the infant is allowed to copy what he sees with no temporal delay. From the point of view of both social and cognitive development, it is also interesting to investigate the development of infants' ability to imitate after a delay. Future experiments using deferred imitation designs of the type developed in this chapter could investigate parameters such as delay, interference, stimulus characteristics, and perhaps, most interestingly, their interaction with age or developmental level.
