Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

Which Relevant Information Do Preschoolers and Scholars Perceive and Select for Imitating a Series of Walking Movements

Lazhar Labiadh^1*, Marie-Martine Ramanantsoa¹ and Mounir Landolsi²

¹Laboratoire TEC Team: Issues and Techniques of the Body -UFr STAPS, Lacretelle Street, 75015 Paris, France

²Laboratory of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine of Sousse, University of Sousse, Tunisia

*Corresponding Author:

Labiadh L
Laboratoire TEC Team: Issues and
Techniques of the Body -UFr STAPS
Lacretelle Street 75015 Paris, France
Tel: (33) 1 56 56 12 22
Fax: (33) 1 56 56 12 12
E-mail: lazharlabiadh@yahoo.fr

Received Date: June 01, 2015; Accepted Date: July 16, 2015; Published Date: July 21, 2015

Citation: Labiadh L, Ramanantsoa MM, Landolsi M (2015) Which Relevant Information Do Preschoolers and Scholars Perceive and Select for Imitating a Series of Walking Movements? J Child Adolesc Behav 3:221. doi:10.4172/2375- 4494.1000221

Copyright: © 2015 Labiadh L, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Background: Imitation is commonly considered as a hierarchically organized mechanism. It is frequently used to explore various scientific researches, but few works had studied the imitation of locomotion movements. Objectives: The current study aimed at investigating what information children of different age groups select and integrate for performing a series of locomotion movements. Methodology: One hundred and thirty children from 3.5 to 7.5 years of age were separately instructed to walk on and between the obstacles in different imitation forms following gestural demonstration, and in a control condition following verbal instructions. The children’s performances were videotaped, coded in binary data, and then transformed in percentage scores. Results: All children performed the modeled walking movements, but did not necessarily do so with the same step-alternating modes or footedness. The model helped the preschoolers to adopt his step-alternating modes and stabilized the schoolers above 5.5 years of age. The disparity of the children’s walking performances was due to the priority to imitate the movement goal rather its aspects. Conclusion: These findings well confirmed that imitation is a hierarchically organized mechanism.

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