Kenneth Kaye

Imitation over a series of trials without feedback: Age six months

The 6-month-old infant is capable of imitation superior to previous reports, when he or she controls the timing of the model presented. By meeting the experimenters gaze, 34 infants elicited a rhythmic burst of five mouth movements, opening and closing. After many trials a majority of the infants themselves produced a burst of two or more such movements. Although no universal sequence of acts emerged from the data, a sequence of accommodation was observed: (1) an orienting to the experimenter; (2) a series of imitations of single features of the model, beginning with mouth movements; (3) a string of two or more features of the model; and finally (4) integrating the features into bursts of mouth opening and closing. The findings are regarded as consistent with Piagets general view of sensory-motor development. However, these subjects over a series of trials gradually imitated movements they could not see themselves make. The sequence of accommodation resembled the sequence of stages usually found in the development of imitation, when imitation is defined as an immediate response to one or two presentations of a model.

THE INFANT AS A PROJECTIVE STIMULUS

n the course of a microanalytic study 1 of mother-infant play during tlie first six months, all of our home visitors and videotape coders were struck by the mothers’ frequent repetition of certain statements to their infants, as well as by individual mothers’ preoccupation with particular themes. These themessometimes implicit, sometimes explicitwere familiar from the psychological literature: rejectionjlove, activityjpassivity, etc. Upon reflection, it was not surprising that such themes should arise spontaneously: T h e babies were clearly en~otionally significant objects to the mothers. Furthermore, the mothers were in a sense confronted with a projective test, for though the explicit instructions were “try to get tlie baby’s attention and play with him as you normally do,” tlie implicit instructions were “look at the baby and say something,” the kind of instructions one would give to a subject with a Rorschach or a T A T card. This paper will demonstrate that virtually everything mothers say under such conditions can rather easily be reduced to a small number of themes, and that there are stable individual differences in the apparent importance of particular themes to individual mothers. METHOD

Book Reviews : H. J. Eysenck, The I.Q. Argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education. New York: Library Press, 1971, 153 pp.

If the essence of adult education is the problem of educating a mind already filled with information and misinformation, in contrast to the supposed open mind of the child, then the public controversy over I.Q., race, social class, education, and intelligence presents a paradigm problem for the adult educator. How is the layman to educate himself in these issues of enormous social importance? He is like a fly whose wings have been clipped by prejudice and intuitive misconceptions, who