Andrew N. Meltzoff

Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates.

Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms. Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate their own unseen behaviors with gestures they see others perform.

Understanding the Intentions of Others: Re-Enactment of Intended Acts by 18-Month-Old Children

Investigated was whether children would re-enact what an adult actually did or what the adult intended to do. In Experiment 1 children were shown an adult who tried, but failed, to perform certain target acts. Completed target acts were thus not observed. Children in comparison groups either saw the full target act or appropriate controls. Results showed that children could infer the adults intended act by watching the failed attempts. Experiment 2 tested childrens understanding of an inanimate object that traced the same movements as the person had followed. Children showed a completely different reaction to the mechanical device than to the person: They did not produce the target acts in this case. Eighteen-month-olds situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. They have already adopted a fundamental aspect of folk psychology-persons (but not inanimate objects) are understood within a framework involving goals and intentions.

Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures.

Newborn infants ranging in age from 0.7 to 71 hours old were tested for their ability to imitate 2 adult facial gestures: mouth opening and tongue protrusion. Each subject acted as his or her own control in a repeated-measures design counterbalanced for order of stimulus presentation. The subjects were tested in low illumination using infrared-sensitive video equipment. The videotaped records were scored by an observer who was uninformed about the gesture shown to the infants. Both frequency and duration of neonatal mouth openings and tongue protrusions were tallied. The results showed that newborn infants can imitate both adult displays. 3 possible mechanisms underlying this early imitative behavior are suggested: instrumental or associative learning, innate releasing mechanisms, and active intermodal matching. It is argued that the data favor the third account.

Children with autism fail to orient to naturally occurring social stimuli

Children with autism were compared to developmentally matched children with Down syndrome or typical development in terms of their ability to visually orient to two social stimuli (name called, hands clapping) and two nonsocial stimuli (rattle, musical jack-in-the-box), and in terms of their ability to share attention (following anothers gaze or point). It was found that, compared to children with Down syndrome or typical development, children with autism more frequently failed to orient to all stimuli, and that this failure was much more extreme for social stimuli. Children with autism who oriented to social stimuli took longer to do so compared to the other two groups of children. Children with autism also exhibited impairments in shared attention. Moreover, for both children with autism and Down syndrome, correlational analyses revealed a relation between shared attention performance and the ability to orient to social stimuli, but no relation between shared attention performance and the ability to orient to nonsocial stimuli. Results suggest that social orienting impairments may contribute to difficulties in shared attention found in autism.

Bilingual experience and executive functioning in young children

Advanced inhibitory control skills have been found in bilingual speakers as compared to monolingual controls (Bialystok, 1999). We examined whether this effect is generalized to an unstudied language group (Spanish-English bilingual) and multiple measures of executive function by administering a battery of tasks to 50 kindergarten children drawn from three language groups: native bilinguals, monolinguals (English), and English speakers enrolled in second-language immersion kindergarten. Despite having significantly lower verbal scores and parent education/income level, Spanish-English bilingual childrens raw scores did not differ from their peers. After statistically controlling for these factors and age, native bilingual children performed significantly better on the executive function battery than both other groups. Importantly, the relative advantage was significant for tasks that appear to call for managing conflicting attentional demands (Conflict tasks); there was no advantage on impulse-control (Delay tasks). These results advance our understanding of both the generalizability and specificity of the compensatory effects of bilingual experience for childrens cognitive development.

Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli

Deferred imitation after a 1-week delay was examined in 14-month-old infants. Six actions, each using a different object, were demonstrated to each infant. One of the six actions was a novel behavior that had a zero probability of occurrence in spontaneous play. In the imitation condition, infants observed the demonstration but were not allowed to touch the objects, thus preventing any immediate imitation. After the 1-week delay, infants returned to the laboratory and their imitation of the adults previous actions was scored. Infants in the imitation condition produced significantly more of the target actions than infants in control groups who were not exposed to the modeling; there was also strong evidence for the imitation of the novel act. From a cognitive perspective deferred imitation provides a means of assessing recall memory and representation in children. From a social-developmental viewpoint the findings illustrate that the behavioral repertoire of infants and their knowledge about objects can expand as a result of seeing the actions of others.

The imitative mind: Development, evolution, and brain bases

Part I. Introduction and Overview: 1. An interdisciplinary introduction to the imitative mind and brain Wolfgang Prinz and Andrew N. Meltzoff Part II. Developmental and Evolutionary Approaches to Imitation: 2. Building blocks for a developmental theory of imitation Andrew N. Meltzoff 3. Imitation and imitation recognition: functional use in preverbal infants and nonverbal children with autism Jacqueline Nadel 4. Self-awareness, other-awareness, and secondary representation Jens B. Asendorpf 5. Notes on individual differences and the assumed elusiveness of neonatal imitation Mikael Heimann 6. Ego function of early imitation Philippe Rochat 7. The imitators representation of the imitated: ape and child A. Whiten 8. Seeing actions as hierarchically organised structures: great ape manual skills Richard W. Byrne Part III. Cognitive Approaches to Imitation, Body Scheme, and Perception-action Coding: 9. Experimental approaches to imitation Wolfgang Prinz 10. Imitation: common mechanisms in the observation and execution of finger and mouth movements Harold Bekkering 11. Goal-directed imitation Merideth Gattis, Harold Bekkering and Andreas Wolschlager 12. Visuomotor couplings in object-orientated and imitative actions Stefan Vogt 13. On bodies and events Barbara Tversky, Julie Bauer Morrison and Jeff Zacks 14. What is the body schema? Catherine L. Reed Part IV. Neuroscience Underpinnings of Imitation and Apraxia: 15. From mirror neurons to imitation: facts and speculations Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese 16. Cell populations in the banks of the superior temporal sulcus of the macaque and imitation T. Jellema, C. I. Baker, M. W. Oram and D. I. Perrett 17. Is there such a thing as a functional equivalence between imagined, observed, and executed action? Jean Decety 18. The role of imitation in body ownership and mental growth Marcel Kinsbourne 19. Imitation, apraxia, and hemisphere dominance Georg Goldenberg and Joachim Hermsdorfer.

Imitation in newborn infants: exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying mechanisms

This study evaluated the psychological mechanisms underlying imitation of facial actions in young infants. A novel aspect of the study was that it used a nonoral gesture that had not been tested before (head movement), as well as a tongue-protrusion gesture. Results showed imitation of both displays. Imitation was not limited to the intervals during which the experimenters movements were displayed; Ss also imitated from memory after the display had stopped. The results established that newborn imitation is not constrained to a few privileged oral movements. The findings support Meltzoff and Moores hypothesis that early imitation is mediated by an active cross-modal matching process. A common representational code may unite the perception and production of basic human acts.

Infant Imitation and Memory: Nine-Month-Olds in Immediate and Deferred Tests

The ability of 9-month-old infants to imitate simple actions with novel objects was investigated. Both immediate and deferred imitation were tested, the latter by interposing a 24-hour delay between the stimulus-presentation and response periods. The results provide evidence for both immediate and deferred imitation; moreover, imitative responding was not significantly dampened by the 24-hour delay. The findings demonstrate that there exists some underlying capacity for deferring imitation of certain acts well under 1 year of age, and thus that this ability does not develop in a stagelike step function at about 18-24 months as commonly predicted. These findings also show that imitation in early infancy can span wide enough delays to be of potential service in social development; actions on novel objects that are observed one day can be stored by the child and repeated the next day. The study of deferred imitation provides a largely untapped method for investigating the nature and development of recall memory in the preverbal child.

Foundations for a new science of learning

Dissecting Dyslexia and Learning Difficulties in learning to read, despite reasonable effort and instruction, form the basis of dyslexia. Gabrieli (p. 280; see the cover) now reviews the latest research into the causes of dyslexia. Neuroimaging studies may give early notice of impending dyslexia, and it is hoped that early interventions may lessen the impact of dyslexia. Learning occurs in many settings. Humans uniquely use the formalized settings of schools and curriculum. Infants and children also do plenty of learning outside these settings, often intermingling social interactions. Meltzoff et al. (p. 284) survey the variety of learning contexts that people experience and discuss how recent advances in neuroscience and robotics are driving a new synthesis of learning. Human learning is distinguished by the range and complexity of skills that can be learned and the degree of abstraction that can be achieved compared with those of other species. Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Human infants have an intense interest in people and their behavior and possess powerful implicit learning mechanisms that are affected by social interaction. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices.