![]() ![]() There is evidence for purposive, selective, and systematic viewing in children between 2 and 3 years of age ( Anderson, Alwitt, Lorch, & Levin, 1979 Anderson & Lorch, 1983), and it has been shown that by 3 years three-quarters of the children can name their favorite TV program ( Lyle & Hoffman, 1972).Īlthough little work has been done concerning the amount of TV viewing by children under 2 years of age, one study found that they were exposed to an average of about 2 hours of television a day ( Hollenbeck, 1978 see also Anderson, Lorch, Field, Collins, & Nathan, 1986). According to a recent Nielsen report (1987), the average 2–5-year-old views about 28 hours per week of television, a figure compatible with a previous study showing that preschoolers spend over one-third of their waking hours viewing TV ( Friedrich & Stein, 1973). Much has been made about the viewing appetite of adults ( Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, & Roberts, 1978), but the data also indicate that television viewing begins quite early. Of today’s American homes, 99% have at least one television set ( Singer & Singer, 1981). As imitation is elevated to a more prominent role in early learning and development, a question arises about the possible impact of TV on infants, because research has shown that television is a prominent part of the natural ecology of modern-day infants. There is an increasing interest in the experimental study of imitation in infancy, with heightened attention to the possibility that imitative processes may play a role in the early development of speech ( Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1988), language ( Snow, 1981 Speidel & Nelson, in press), and early motor, cognitive, and social skills ( Meltzoff, 1985, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c Uzgiris, 1981). They do so in the dual sense of showing that infants can relate 2-D representations to their own actions on real objects in 3-D space, and moreover that the information picked up through TV can be internally represented over lengthy delays before it is used to guide the real-world action. The results also add to a growing body of literature on prelinguistic representational capacities. The finding of deferred imitation of TV models has social and policy implications, because it suggests that TV viewing in the home could potentially affect infant behavior and development more than heretofore contemplated. The results showed significant imitation at both ages, and furthermore showed that even the youngest group imitated after the 24-hour delay. In deferred imitation, infants were exposed to a TV depiction of an adult manipulating a novel toy in a particular way but were not presented with the real toy until the next day. Infants’ ability to imitate TV models was explored at 2 ages, 14 and 24 months, under conditions of immediate and deferred imitation. Can infants “understand” the content of television enough to govern their real-world behavior accordingly? One way to explore this question is to present a model via television for infants to imitate. The question arises whether TV viewing merely presents infants with a salient collection of moving patterns or whether they will readily pick up information depicted in this 2-D representation and incorporate it into their own behavior. Studies indicate that infants in our culture are exposed to significant amounts of TV, often as a baby-sitting strategy by busy caretakers. ![]()
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