About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 22. Social Relationships

Abstract

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Understanding the development of children's adaptive behavior, which is the conceptual, social, and practical skills necessary to function in their daily lives, is essential, since such behavior promotes their future success. Recently, several studies revealed that future adaptive behavior is predicted by early characteristics such as executive function (Pugliese et al., 2016) and the age of first walking unaided (Wang et al., 2023). Although imitation is considered crucial for acquiring new skills and behavior, no studies have focused on imitative ability as a predictor of adaptive behavior. In this study, we investigated whether imitative ability in early development (at 14 months) would predict adaptive behavior in school-aged children (at 8 years).

We analyzed data from the Hamamatsu Birth Cohort for Mothers and Children, a longitudinal cohort of children born in a specific hospital in Japan (Takagai et al., 2015). We focused on the data from the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) measured at 8 years and analyzed the domain-level scores (communication, daily living skills, and socialization) as the dependent variables. The predictor was the score of imitative behavior at 14 months, retrieved from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories. We used the children's demographic data as covariates, such as gender, birth weight, father's and mother's educational background, annual income at the time of registration in the cohort, and the mothers' frequency of alcohol consumption and smoking during pregnancy. In addition, the following variables were treated as covariates: scores of expressive language, receptive language, fine motor, gross motor, and visual reception at 14 months from the Mullen Scales of Early Learning, autistic tendencies at 8 years obtained from the Social Responsiveness Scale II, and IQ at 8 years from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC). The total number of available data was 724 (354 female) without missing values for all the above data.

We conducted multiple regression analyses separately on three VABS domain-level scores (Table 1). Results showed that the imitation score significantly predicted adaptive behavior in all domains (communication: p = .021, daily living skills: p <.001, socialization: p <.001) even after controlling for various factors related to imitation (e.g., motor control ability at 14 months) and adaptive behavior (i.e., autistic tendency and IQ at 8 years). Moreover, the imitation score strongly predicted daily living skills and socialization, while IQ was a stronger predictor of communication.

The present findings reveal that imitative ability during early development predicts adaptive behavior in school-aged children, even when controlling for other variables. We also found that the imitation score was strongly related to daily living and social skills. This may be due to imitation being a crucial learning process for young children to develop appropriate tool-use skills (e.g., using chopsticks, cleaning room) and socially desirable behaviors (e.g., expressing emotions that are appropriate to the situation, sharing toys with friends). On the other hand, the communication skills measured by the VABS might be acquired based on an individual's intellectual ability. Our results may contribute to elucidating the developmental process of adaptive function.

Author information

Author	Role
Miyuki KONDO, NTT Communication Science Laboratories	Presenting author
Asami SHINOHARA, NTT Communication Science Laboratories	Non-presenting author
Hiroki HIGUCHI, NTT Communication Science Laboratories	Non-presenting author
Tessei KOBAYASHI, NTT Communication Science Laboratories	Non-presenting author
Tomoko NISHIMURA, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine	Non-presenting author
Toshiki IWABUCHI, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine	Non-presenting author
Kenji TSUCHIYA, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine	Non-presenting author

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