A more promising possibility stems from the finding that there was a correlation between successful
imitation of the manner and the choice to imitate path over goal. The manner component of the
event (hopping or sliding) could be successfully imitated on all trials regardless of whether the children
opted to imitate the path or the goal, but children did better with manner when they opted to
match the experimenter’s path. It should probably not be surprising that there is a tighter link between
path and manner than between manner and goal. Although path information and manner information
are independent from each other, they do occur simultaneously within the event; therefore,
children might not encode them in a completely independent fashion. The temporal link between
manner and path components may lead to a highlighting of the path. Children who choose to imitate
path are effectively choosing two components at the expense of goal because the path choice facilitates
their ability to correctly imitate the manner component. This perspective brings these data in
line with the initial hypothesis. If one of the reasons why children are goal biased in more functionally