"Do babies have a deeper conception of what it is to be human? There is some reason to think that they do. Twenty years ago one of us, Andy, made a startling discovery. One-month-old babies imitate facial expressions. If you stick your tongue out at a baby, the baby will stick his tongue out at you; open your mouth, and the baby will open hers. How do we know that this is really imitation, that we aren't just reading it into the babies' endlessly mobile faces? Andy systematically showed babies either someone sticking out his tongue or someone opening his mouth. He videotaped the babies' faces.Then he showed the tapes of the babies' faces to someone else, someone who had no idea which gesture the babies had seen. This second person had to say whether each baby was sticking out his or her tongue or opening his or her mouth. It turned out there was a systematic relation between what the babies did, judged by this necessarily neutral and objective observer, and what the babies saw.
Ar first Andy did these experiments with three-week-olds. But to demonstrate that this ability was really innate, he had to show that newborn babies could imitate. So he set up a lab next to the labor room in the local hospital and arranged with parents to call him when the baby was about to arrive. For a year he would wake up in the middle of the night, or dash out of a lab meeting, and rush to the hospital, in almost as much of a hurry as the expectant parents themselves. But that meant he could test babies less than a day old; the youngest baby was only forty-two minutes old. The newborns imitated, too.
At first glance this ability to imitate might seem curious and cute but not deeply signiflcant. But if you think about it a minute, it is actually amazing. There are no mirrors in the womb: newborns have never seen their own face. So how could they know whether their tongue is inside or outside their mouth? There is another way of knowing what your face is like. As you read this, you probably have a good idea of your facial expression (we hope intense concentration leavened by the occasional smile). Try sticking out your tongue (in a suitably private setting). The way you know you've succeeded is through kinesthesia, your internal feeling of your own body.
In order to imitate, newborn babies must somehow understand the similarity between that internal feeling and the external face they see, a round shape with a long pink thing at the bottom moving back and forth. Newborn babies not only distinguish and prefer faces, they also seem to recognize that those faces are like their own face.They recognize that other people are "like me." There is nothing more personal, more part of you, than this internal sense you have of your own body, your expressions and movements, your aches and tickles. And yet from the time we're born, we seem to link this deeply personal self to the bodily movements of other people, movements we can only see and not feel. Nature ingeniously gives us a jump start on the Other Minds problem. We know, quite directly, that we are like other people and they are like us."
© Alicia Gopnik, Patricia Kuhl, Andrew Meltzoff
"The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn" (1999)
cit. "The Norton Psychology Reader" [link]
Ar first Andy did these experiments with three-week-olds. But to demonstrate that this ability was really innate, he had to show that newborn babies could imitate. So he set up a lab next to the labor room in the local hospital and arranged with parents to call him when the baby was about to arrive. For a year he would wake up in the middle of the night, or dash out of a lab meeting, and rush to the hospital, in almost as much of a hurry as the expectant parents themselves. But that meant he could test babies less than a day old; the youngest baby was only forty-two minutes old. The newborns imitated, too.
At first glance this ability to imitate might seem curious and cute but not deeply signiflcant. But if you think about it a minute, it is actually amazing. There are no mirrors in the womb: newborns have never seen their own face. So how could they know whether their tongue is inside or outside their mouth? There is another way of knowing what your face is like. As you read this, you probably have a good idea of your facial expression (we hope intense concentration leavened by the occasional smile). Try sticking out your tongue (in a suitably private setting). The way you know you've succeeded is through kinesthesia, your internal feeling of your own body.
In order to imitate, newborn babies must somehow understand the similarity between that internal feeling and the external face they see, a round shape with a long pink thing at the bottom moving back and forth. Newborn babies not only distinguish and prefer faces, they also seem to recognize that those faces are like their own face.They recognize that other people are "like me." There is nothing more personal, more part of you, than this internal sense you have of your own body, your expressions and movements, your aches and tickles. And yet from the time we're born, we seem to link this deeply personal self to the bodily movements of other people, movements we can only see and not feel. Nature ingeniously gives us a jump start on the Other Minds problem. We know, quite directly, that we are like other people and they are like us."
© Alicia Gopnik, Patricia Kuhl, Andrew Meltzoff
"The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn" (1999)
cit. "The Norton Psychology Reader" [link]
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