Do as I do

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I've been thinking a lot about imitation recently, in preparation for an interview on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. A few things intrigued me about the most recent research, and I didn't get a chance to talk about them all in the interview. So here's a brief supplement:

I knew about the classic work of Meltzoff and colleagues on neonatal imitation, but I'd struggled to see evidence of that kind of very early imitation in my own kids. Meltzoff's findings have not always been replicated, and when they are, they seem to require certain very specific experimental conditions to be in place. But it's also interesting that neonatal imitation has been suggested to be a kind of innate reflex that disappears quite soon after birth, only to re-emerge a couple of months later when more sophisticated, cortical brain systems take over responsibility. That's probably why parents don't usually see imitation until babies are a couple of months old. There were several times when I thought Athena was imitating a smile in the first few weeks, but I wasn't really convinced that it was happening until she was about seven weeks.

The starting point for the radio piece was the story I blogged about a few weeks ago, on newborns' ability to 'cry in' their own accent. I wanted to make the point in the interview that what's special about these findings is that they show that babies are capable not just of picking up information in the womb, but of using that knowledge to shape their own behaviour. They don't just learn the accent; they reproduce it for themselves. Imitation gets really clever when it works at a distance: when the mimicking is produced some time after the initial stimulus is perceived. We call this 'deferred imitation', and it really gets going in babies from after around six months.

A professional mimic is, of course, an expert in deferred imitation, and the comedienne Jan Ravens unsurprisingly stole the show with some very funny take-offs. But toddlers' imitation can be even more sophisticated. Babies and young children don't just imitation actions; they also imitate intentions. Some of the most interesting recent imitation research shows that children will copy what they thought an adult was trying to do, rather than what she actually did do. For example, a toddler watches a scenario where an adult is trying to drop a ping-pong ball into a cup. The adult misses the cup, and the ball bounces off the side of the cup and onto the table. What will the toddler do when given these materials? She will drop the ball straight into the cup. She will copy what she thought the grown-up was trying to do, rather than what she actually succeeded in doing.

There's also some great new research on over-imitation. This is where children don't just copy the actions that are essential to producing an effect; they will also copy extraneous additional actions which they seem to judge are important. For example, an adult shows a child how you can make a box make an interesting sound by pressing a button on the top. He then proceeds to press the button and elicit the sound, but not before tracing three completely pointless circles in the air above the box. The toddlers copy the button-pressing, but they also copy the irrelevant actions that precede it. Chimpanzees, in contrast, don't bother with all the fancy stuff; they just get on and press the button. It's as though the human children also want to imitate the adult's full set of intentions (the irrelevant actions as well as the relevant ones), rather than just the basic cause-and-effect.

There's plenty more that could be said about this complex and fascinating area of research, but for the moment here's the link to the show.

God and the builders

'Did God get the world started and the builders finished it?'  

And so we have frequently, in recent months, come to debate the Big Fella's role in furnishing us with what there is. I am pretty convinced about evolution by natural selection, although I did spend much of my Cambridge interview trying to convince the indulgent don opposite that the universe had not been around long enough for us to have inched towards perfection by such careful degrees. So I find it hard to tell Isaac that anyone made anything, in the sense of setting out with an intention (that most human of mental quantities) and then assiduously seeing it through. I'm one of the group of people for whom Richard Dawkins reserves some of the largest doses of his prodigious contempt: those who would claim that religious belief gives human beings a rewarding, affirming narrative that helps them to make sense of their lives. (Read RD's preface to the revised edition of The God Delusion to see why he believes that this 'patronising' attitude won't do.) I can cope with the wrath of Dawkins, but not the disappointment of my own child. Isaac wants answers, and I'm the one who's supposed to be giving them. 

How creationist should we be with our kids? Some recent research suggests that, by coming over all Dawkins with our little ones, we might be wasting our time. In his wonderful Descartes' Baby, Paul Bloom reviews some findings that children's belief in creation stems from a natural tendency to attribute intention where in fact there is none. As part of the process of acquiring a theory of mind, children's mind-reading sometimes hits the wrong targets, and sees, for example, a mountain range as having been put there on purpose, by some higher, invisible miglior fabbro. 

Here's how I summarise Bloom's arguments in The Baby in the Mirror: 

It’s easy to see why people believe in a Creator. So much is mysterious: why the sun rises, how gases fuse to make water, how blind natural selection could have launched birds into the air. Through the centuries, children have wanted answers to these questions, and adults have had to try to find ways of explaining them. If Bloom is right, those adults needn’t have bothered. The explanations were already at hand. Until children’s thinking is sufficiently developed to cope with the hard science, the belief that God or some other supernatural being is responsible for all these miracles comes to youngsters as naturally as language does.

So I have to manage Isaac's perfectly natural creationist leanings while still being honest to my own truth. It has the makings of a classic fudge. God made the world possible, I tell him, and then Nature did the rest. I'm starting to sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Sticky mittens

Avid readers of the TLS will have noticed that it recently carried a review of The Baby in the Mirror by Alison Gopnik. You can read Gopnik's review here. I responded to the review and the letter was published this week. You can read my response here.

Call that art? Well, Daddy does

I have forgotten how to watch a 'grown-up' film. Sit me down in front of a street-raw depiction of urban alienation, say, or a sensitive charting of the emotional undercurrents that tug at the shell of a splintering family, and I will find myself asking, Where are the singing chipmunks? Why no intertextual references to classic fairytales? Is this movie really not interested in indoctrinating me into the moral values of the Disney/Pixar co-operative? Family life, and family viewing, have reduced me to a kind of dyslexia of the silver screen. I would once rush to watch Kieslowski or Todd Solondz; now I need things spelled out for me, preferably with plenty of acrobatic song-and-dance routines. If movies are texts, as the cultural studies pundits like to tell us, then I have forgotten how to read them. 

It doesn't help that I live in a part of the world that is poorly served by cinema. To catch a recent release, I have to trek to Gateshead's Metro Centre, where cinema seems to be less about watching films and more about talking, sleeping and eating pungent food in sociable darkness. Frustrating, because there is one film that has caught my eye but doesn't yet seemed to have found its way up north. Amir Bar-Lev's 'My Kid Could Paint That' tells the story of four-year-old Marla Olmstead, whose colourful paintings famously took the New York art world by storm. The story interests me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it seems to be as much about the adults who are trying variously to protect and exploit Marla as it is about an ostensibly ordinary little girl. It touches on the question of whose interests are being served by bringing children's activities into the public eye in this way, and it reminds me that some of the side-effects of my own project—thrusting Athena, and to a certain extent Isaac, into the limelight—raise ethical questions which I cannot completely resolve. 

The other interesting thing about this film is that it asks whether children's creations can truly be described as artistic. Artists through the centuries have, of course, taken children's artworks seriously, both as inspiration for new works and as creations in their own right. Some of my favourite examples come from the work on children's crib speech, such as that produced by a two-year-old girl called Emily, studied by a group of psychologists and linguists in the 1980s. Many of Emily's bedtime monologues are startlingly beautiful. She uses self-directed language to replay significant events from the day that has just ended, and to plan ahead to what she will do and experience tomorrow. Reading little Emily's self-talk, and that of Anthony, another famous proponent of crib speech, makes us concur with the great linguist Roman Jakobson's judgement that such monologues are outstanding examples of infant art. 

In The Baby in the Mirror, I ask what Athena's various imaginative creations can tell us about the cognitive-developmental story behind children's art-making, as well as her wider understanding of the social functions of art. Much of the most interesting recent work in this respect has been conducted by Paul Bloom, whose excellent Descartes' Baby is partly concerned with what children's understanding of the art they produce and consume can tell us about humanity's broader relation to all things aesthetic. Particularly interesting is the way Bloom relates children's understanding of art to their ability to read the intentions of their social partners. Not only do you have to understand the creator's intention to depict a particular entity, but you also have to comprehend that the artist intended the result to be taken in a particular way: as a work of art, rather than as a factual document or an impertinence. In the chapter 'Lightning Ridge is Falling Down', I explore this two-level model of artistic intentions in relation to Athena's home movies, drawings, jokes and narrative songs. Perhaps of most interest to me is the question of whether, in these aesthetic experiments, Athena intends to represent her experience for herself. Does art have a personal function, for the maker, as well as a social function, for its audience? I would like to have said more in the book about the fascinating work of Peter van Sommers on this topic. Van Sommers found that adult participants in a psychological study would use private drawings for some of the same reasons that they use self-directed speech. People apparently use private artworks—doodles and scribbles, as well as more elaborate creations—to regulate their emotions and plan their behaviour, with no intention that the drawings will ever be seen by anyone but themselves. How much of professional (and amateur) artists' work has a similarly self-serving function? Is art really a gift to society (as Lewis Hyde has argued), or is it at least in part a treat for ourselves? 

It will be interesting to see how Marla's story fits in with this intention-reading account of children's artistic understanding. I suspect that she appreciates enough about the social functions of art to comprehend at least some of the fuss that has surrounded her. If anyone is planning a northern release for 'My Kid Could Paint That', they will have at least one guaranteed viewer. I may be slightly out of practice, but I'm sure that, if it has kids in it, I will understand most of what's going on.