Children and adults distinguish irrelevant from relevant actions in over-imitation tasks – but some irrelevant actions are easier to identify than others

Participants were instructed that after watching the videos they would be asked to extract a marble themselves. Therefore, we expected participants to direct their attention to the action which seemed most likely to be task-relevant. We measured their looking times to both simultaneously demonstrated actions, which allowed us to calculate a preference score that indicated whether they looked longer at one or the other action (for more details see the word document "Variable description").

We hypothesized that looking preferences are stronger when it is easy for participants to identify the task-relevant action, whereas we thought looking preferences are lower when it is harder for participants to identify the relevant action (for more details see the word document "Hypotheses").