Andrew N. Meltzoff - Early Research

Early Research

In 1977, Science published the ground-breaking paper "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" by Meltzoff, who was still at Oxford, and M. Keith Moore of the University of Washington. According to the abstract,

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.

Six infants were each shown three facial gestures and one manual gesture, sequentially. Their responses were videotaped and scored by observers who did not know which gesture the infants had seen. The statistically significant results showed that infants of this young age were able to imitate all four gestures.

The experiment was ground-breaking because it showed infant imitation of adults at a much earlier age than was thought possible. Jean Piaget, for instance, had thought that infants reached the stage of facial imitation at 8 to 12 months. The study also showed early facial imitation, something previously thought to be impossible at this young age because of its necessarily crossmodal nature. (Infants can see others' faces but not their own; they can feel their own facial movements, but not those of others.) The findings had implications not only for theoretical psychology, but also for the study of memory, learning, language acquisition, and socialization.

A similar study was later done with a group of 40 infants with a mean age of 72 hours (youngest 42 minutes), with the same results, showing that the intermodal mapping infants displayed was unlikely to be learned. However, later studies have suggested that while neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion is widespread, the findings for the imitation of other gestures at this young age are more mixed.