Very young infants cannot mimic facial expressions, hand gestures and the sounds of voices, says research published in Current Biology. The study concludes that humans are not born with this ability: They learn it over time.

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Neonates will not necessarily produce the same gesture as the one they see.
Image credit: University of Queensland

Human children accurately copy the actions of those around them, and the skill of learning one’s culture from a young age is what enables communities to maintain behavioral traditions through the generations.

The ability to imitate has long been assumed to occur from birth, with a number of studies claiming that newborns imitate parents and others.

Not only publications for parents, but a number of psychologists, neuroscientists, and pediatricians have all supported this view, while others have disputed it.

To “clear up the confusion,” Virginia Slaughter, of the University of Queensland in Australia, and colleagues decided to take a closer look.

They set out to examine variations in imitation behavior in young infants. They thought this might predict later imitation behavior, and that it might be linked to other aspects of social development.

They studied 106 infants and scored their responses on tests at intervals during the first 2 months of their lives, at the ages of 1, 2, 6, and 9 weeks.

To assess the infants’ behavior, the authors started each time by measuring their levels of tongue protrusion and mouth opening.

They then presented the infants with 11 gestures.

The gestures were: Opening the mouth, poking the tongue out, making a sad face and making a happy face, pointing the index finger and grasping, and making an “eee” sound, a clicking sound, and an “mmm” sound.

After interacting in this way with the children, the infants’ measurements were taken again.

Findings showed that the babies did poke their tongues out more often after seeing an adult doing the same.

However, the authors conclude that rather than imitating what they saw, the infants were just as likely to produce a different gesture as they were to produce a matching one.

In the team’s opinion, there is no evidence of very young infants being capable of imitation.

The findings suggest that imitation is a learned behavior, not a skill that babies are born with.

The team is now following up the infants into the second year of their life, in the hope of finding out at what stage they do begin to imitate, and what contributes to this.

Infants aren’t born with the ability to copy what other people do, but they acquire that skill during the first months of life.”

Victoria Slaughter

The authors suggest that, if imitation does not start at birth, the age at which it begins to emerge could be around 6 to 8 months. They also propose that being imitated by others may help infants to learn this skill themselves.

The same researchers have previously observed that parents imitate their babies once every 2 minutes on average. This could be how infants learn to link their gestures with those of others.

Why did previous studies conclude the opposite? According to Slaughter, these works offered the infants a limited number of gestures. Most of the studies only tested infants’ responses to one of two gestures: Poking out the tongue or opening the mouth.

The current study, in contrast, incorporated a wider range of behaviors.

“If infants also increase their tongue protrusions when an adult models a happy face or finger pointing, then it’s not a case of imitation, but probably excitement at seeing an adult do something interesting,” Slaughter says.

The authors hope that parents whose infants do not appear to imitate them will be encouraged that this is normal behavior, and that their children will learn to do so in time.

They conclude: “The results challenge the existence of this long-debated phenomenon and prompt revision of a number of influential theories placing it at the foundation of social cognition.”

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