Traditionally, infants have learned how to interact with objects in their environment through direct observations of adults and peers. In recent decades these models have been available over different media, and this has introduced non-human agents to infants’ learning environments. Humanoid robots are increasingly portrayed as social agents in on screen, but the degree to which infants are capable of observational learning from screen-based robots is unknown. The current study thus investigated how well 1- to 3-year-olds (N = 230) could imitate on-screen robots relative to on-screen and live humans. Participants exhibited an imitation deficit for robots that varied with age. Furthermore, the well-known video deficit did not replicate as expected, and was weak and transient relative to past research. Together, the findings documented here suggest that infants are learning from media in ways that differ from past generations, but that this new learning is nuanced when novel technologies are involved.

传统上，婴儿通过直接观察成人和同龄人学会了如何与环境中的物体互动。近几十年来，这些模型已经在不同的媒体上可用，这将非人类代理引入了婴儿的学习环境。人形机器人越来越多地被描绘成屏幕上的社会代理，但婴儿能够从基于屏幕的机器人进行观察学习的程度尚不清楚。因此，当前的研究调查了 1 至 3 岁儿童（N= 230) 可以相对于屏幕上和真人模仿屏幕上的机器人。参与者对随年龄变化的机器人表现出模仿缺陷。此外，众所周知的视频缺陷没有像预期的那样复制，并且相对于过去的研究来说是微弱的和短暂的。总之，这里记录的研究结果表明，婴儿从媒体中学习的方式与过去几代人不同，但是当涉及新技术时，这种新的学习是微妙的。