Imitation in Child Development

When does imitation become possible?How important is this ability in the learning of infants and children?Andrew Meltzoff and M.Keith Moore argue that even newborns and very young infants imitate a variety of responses,including tongue protrusion,mouth opening,and possibly even facial expressions portraying such emotions as happiness,sadness,and surprise.Although some investigators have been unable to replicate these results,many others,including the authors of one study involving infants from Nepal,report a high degree of imitative competence in newborns.

Even more controversial is what imitative behaviors mean.The influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget,for example,claimed infants younger than eight to twelve months could imitate someone else’s behavior only when able to see themselves making these responses.Because babies do not ordinarily view their own faces, imitative facial gestures would be impossible,according to Piaget, until after about a year in age,when symbolic capacities (abilities to use a symbol,an object,or a word to stand for something)emerge. From this perspective,then,the facial gestures that infants younger than a year make in response to a model’s facial expression are stereotyped,rigid responses set off by or linked to limited forms of stimulation rather than imitations of what the child has seen.For example,perhaps tongue protrusion by a model arouses the infant, which in turn promotes a sucking response that naturally invokes tongue protrusion from the infant.If this is the case,infants could be responding to just a few types of stimuli and producing a kind of reflexive (automatic)motor activity that is not really a form of imitation.

Meltzoff and Moore counter that very young infants imitate a variety of responses,modify their imitations to increasingly match the modeled behavior over time,and exhibit their imitations primarily to other people and not to inanimate objects.These arguments contradict the view that such behaviors are simply a fixed pattern of reflexive actions.They propose instead that infants imitate in order to prolong interacting with others.In fact,babies as young as six weeks will imitate behaviors of a model up to twenty-four hours later.Such imitation is a way to continue the earlier imitative communication with the model.If this interpretation is correct,imitation has an important social-communicative function and is one of the earliest games babies play with other people.

Between six and twelve months of age,infants display far more frequent and precise imitations,matching a wide range of modeled behaviors.Piaget and others believed that deferred imitation,the ability to imitate well after some activity has been demonstrated,is not possible until about eighteen to twenty- four months of age.Piaget believed deferred imitation,along with pretend play and the emergence of language,marks an important transition from one stage of thinking to the next and provides one of the first major pieces of evidence for symbolic capacities.However, as we have already seen,Meltzoff and Moore claim infants as young as six weeks can reproduce a model’s behavior a day after seeing it.

Deferred imitation involving actions associated with objects can also be observed far earlier than Piaget claimed.For example, six month olds will remove a mitten from a puppet’s hand,shake it, and try to put it back on the puppet after observing this sequence of actions performed by a model twenty-four hours earlier.Moreover, toddlers as young as fourteen months who see a peer pulling, pushing,poking,and inserting toys in the laboratory or at a day care center will reproduce the behaviors in their own homes as much as two days later when given the same toys.The capacity for deferred imitation,then,appears to exist much sooner than previously assumed.In fact,the results are consistent with research on memory showing that infants younger than one year can recognize stimuli hours and even days later.The observances of imitation at very young ages are important from a social learning perspective, providing clear and compelling evidence that infants,as well as older children,learn many new behaviors by observing others.

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?When does imitation become possible?How important is this ability in the learning of infants and children?Andrew Meltzoff and M.Keith Moore argue that even newborns and very young infants imitate a variety of responses,including tongue protrusion,mouth opening,and possibly even facial expressions portraying such emotions as happiness,sadness,and surprise.Although some investigators have been unable to replicate these results,many others,including the authors of one study involving infants from Nepal,report a high degree of imitative competence in newborns.

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