Vicarious Reward and Task Complexity as Determinants of Imitative Learning.

The effects of task complexity and vicarious reward upon children's ability to learn a substantial educational task through modeling were investigated. After observing a models performance, all subjects (elementary school students) were offered direct reward for matching responses. Accuracy of imitative learning was inversely related to task complexity and facilitated by the presence of vicarious reward. However, as predicted, vicarious reward had a significant effect only for subjects in the high complexity condition, and had negligible effects for subjects exposed to the low complexity task. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that vicarious and direct reward may operate additively, with the former serving primarily to enchance subjects attention to the relevant modeling cues. (Author)