Human infants have an enormous amount to learn from others to become full-fledged
members of their culture. Thus, it is important that they learn from reliable, rather than
unreliable, models. In two experiments, we investigated whether 14-month-olds (a) imitate
instrumental actions and (b) adopt the individual preferences of a model differently
depending on the model's previous reliability. Infants were shown a series of videos in which
a model acted on familiar objects either competently or incompetently. They then watched as?…