Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 224

Toddler Tula puts a bowl on her head and pats it just as she watched her older sister do yesterday. Imitation is an important way in which children and adults learn. Can newborns imitate others? Believe it or not, some research suggests that newborns have a primitive ability to learn through imitation. In a classic study (see Figure 4.11), 2-day-old infants mimicked adult facial expressions, including sticking out the tongue, opening and closing the mouth, and sticking out the lower lip (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). The prevalence and function of neonate imitation is debated (Suddendorf, Oostenbroek, Nielsen, & Slaughter, 2013). Some studies have failed to replicate this ability (Oostenbroek et al., 2016) and have suggested that tongue protruding simply reflects a general spontaneous newborn behavior (Keven & Akins, 2017), that it reflects arousal (Vincini, Jhang, Buder, & Gallagher, 2017), and that neonate imitation is not developmentally similar to later social imitation (Suddendorf et al., 2013). Others have confirmed that newborns from several ethnic groups and cultures display early capacities for imitation (Meltzoff & Kuhl, 1994; Nadel & Butterworth, 1999). In one study, newborns made corresponding mouth movements to both vowel and consonant vocal models; when the adult model made an a sound, newborns opened their mouths, and when the model made an m sound, newborns clutched their mouths (Chen, Striano, & Rakoczy, 2004). Studies that require infants to imitate several behaviors in response to different stimuli suggest that neonate imitation is not simply an arousal response (Nagy, Pilling, Orvos, & Molnar, 2013).

Description

Figure 4.11 Neonate Imitation

In this classic experiment, Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated that neonates imitated the adults’ facial expression more often than chance, suggesting that they are capable of facial imitation—a groundbreaking finding.

Source: Meltzoff and Moore (1977). Reprinted with permission of AAAS.

Newborns mimic facial expressions, but they are simply carrying out an innate program thought to be controlled by the mirror neuron system, located in the premotor cortex (Binder et al., 2017). The mirror neuron system, an inborn capacity to make associations and respond to the actions of others by mirroring their actions in our own neural circuits, is apparent in both newborn humans and monkeys (Cook, Bird, Catmur, Press, & Heyes, 2014; Olsen, 2006; Shaw & Czekóová, 2013). The ability to copy others’ actions likely serves an evolutionarily adaptive purpose in humans, perhaps to aid the development of social communication (Tramacere, Pievani, & Ferrari, 2017). Newborns do not understand imitation; rather, the action of mirror neurons naturally syncs their body movements with the model. The regulatory mechanisms to inhibit imitative responding develop during infancy (Rizzolatti, Sinigaglia, & Anderson, 2008).

In summary, infants enter the world equipped with several basic learning capacities that permit them to learn even before birth. Newborns display classical and operant conditioning, imitation, and habituation, illustrating that they are wired to attend to their environment. Not only do infants display early competencies that permit them to learn quickly but they are also surprisingly adept at sensing and perceiving stimuli around them.