The imitation choice phase was designed to keep children from being able to imitate all three components;
in particular, participants needed to choose between the path and goal components. Participants
completed an average of 7.6 (maximum of 8) of the imitation choice trials. There were four
possible patterns of choice behavior, where children could (a) match both the path and goal components
(and fail to respect the ‘‘flow” of the event), (b) fail to match both the path and goal components
(effectively ignoring the model), (c) match the path component at the expense of goal (the goal might
be omitted, the opposite goal might be chosen, or multiple goals might be chosen), or (d) match the
goal component at the expense of path (the path might be omitted, the opposite path might be chosen,
or multiple paths might be chosen). The percentage of trials conforming to each type of pattern is
shown in Table 2. In general, children appeared to prefer preserving the path component at the expense
of the goal component.