Do as I say, not as I do: Insights From Behavioural and fNIRS Research Into the Role of Inhibitory Control in Resisting Imitation in Young Children.

This thesis examines the debate around the role of domain-general versus domain-specific mechanisms in the inhibition of imitative responses. In other words, whether there are differences between the mechanisms underlying the inhibition of imitative responses as compared with non-imitative responses. While most of the research on this topic so far comes from patients with brain damage to the frontal lobes, here we proposed that given the immature prefrontal cortex in the developing brain, young children are ideal subjects to investigate this topic. Studies in this thesis sought to contribute to this debate by testing the inhibition of imitation in children between the ages of three to five years. Study 1 presented a new inhibitory task in which the rule teaching was standardised. Comparison against a control condition demonstrated that this task was effective even in young children. In Study 2 we investigated the relationship between children’s poor inhibitory control and their tendency to imitate using an existing data set. Whilst the planned correlations were not significant, exploratory analyses revealed that, contrary to our expectations, children with better inhibitory control demonstrated greater imitative tendencies. Building on this work, the aim of the final two studies was to design a task with well-matched methodologies to test the inhibition of imitative and non-imitative prepotent responses in young children. Study 3 was conducted online with children aged 3-5 years due to COVID. Based on the findings, Study 4 used this same task to investigate the neural correlates of inhibiting imitative and non-imitative responses in 4-year-olds. We suggest that these results provide tentative evidence of a domain-specific network associated with the inhibition of imitative tendencies. The work presented in this thesis has introduced the study of imitation inhibition within a developmental population with promising results, providing interesting avenues for future research.