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.

The one about agency and identity

The second of my posts on the Lego Star Wars theme is now up. The theme: how babies come to establish a sense of their own identities through action. You can read the post here.

The science of parenting

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I've been thinking a lot about parenting this week. I've been helping to devise a new course on parenting for the School of Life, and that's involved reading lots of the research on how different parenting styles and practices are associated with different developmental outcomes. One impression that has been confirmed for me is that there is very little solid scientific evidence in this area. There are far more people out there willing to offer advice on parenting than there are people willing to test these ideas scientifically.

So I was pleased to rediscover a website called Parenting Science, which promises information on the science of parenting with full scientific back-up. The website is run by an anthropologist, Gwen Dewar, who cares about making sure that ideas about parenting are founded in properly referenced scientific findings. I'm sure that Gwen and I would disagree on a few things, but her site is a welcome antidote to the opinion dressed as science that parents are constantly being fed. Tear up your parenting books and get yourselves over there.

Lego Star Wars, Part I

In case you missed this post on my Psychology Today blog, I was writing about my experiences of playing Lego Star Wars with Isaac on the Wii, and some recent research on how young children learn to collaborate. You can read the post in full here. Part II is coming soon... watch the skies.

'Accents' in the womb?

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BBC News ran a story yesterday on babies' ability to pick up certain aspects of their parents' accents in the womb. Before we get carried away by the image of neonates springing out into the world speaking broad Geordie or Brummie, we should look at the study (in press in the journal Current Biology) in a little more detail. The German researchers recorded and analysed the cries of some very young babies—between 2 and 5 days old—born into two language groups, French and German. There were 30 babies in each group. The analysis of the recordings involved examination of the cries' 'melody contours', which makes use of the fact that the cry of a baby follows a distinctive pattern: first rising in pitch, and then falling, in a single arc. 

The results of the analyses showed clear differences between the language groups. The French babies' cries spent longer on the rising part of the arc, and the German cries were skewed towards the falling part. These patterns match up to the particular prosodic patterns of the French and German languages, as demonstrated in other studies (and fully evident to listeners to those spoken languages).

There's nothing particularly new about a finding that foetuses can pick up and learn about auditory information in the womb. In my book, I describe an experiment conducted by Peter Hepper two decades ago, in which babies who had been exposed to the theme tune of the soap Neighbours showed a preference for that tune after they had been born. Plenty of other convincing evidence for foetal learning has been published since the time of Hepper's study. What is striking about this new study is that babies aren't just learning patterns in the womb, but they are also showing an ability to mimic them—which must call for some very sophisticated control over the articulatory system (the system of muscles that allows us to produce speech). Previous findings had shown vocal imitation at 12 weeks, but no earlier. Rather than just making a noise that is constrained by the respiratory (breathing) cycle, newborn babies are actually shaping the sound they make, and doing it in response to sounds they have already heard in the womb. This is particularly true of the French babies, with their 'rising' intonation—not the sort of cry you would hear if babies were simply vocalising their breaths.

In her comments to BBC News, study author Kathleen Wermke speculates that 'crying with an accent' may play a part in attracting the mother's attention and thus forging a bond with her. I was also interested in the comment by Debbie Mills of Bangor University, who questions whether this neonatal capacity for imitation might fall away shortly after birth only to return later in a different form. This 'inverse-U' trajectory of development is commonly observed in the first few months of life, with newborns showing capacities that they then lose, only to recover them again a few months later as different neural systems take responsibility for them.

(Mampe et al., Newborns’ Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language, Current Biology (2009),
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Babies Cry With an Accent, Study Finds (abcnews.go.com)
• Babies Already Have An Accent (scientificamerican.com)
• Newborn Babies May Cry in their Mother Tongues (usnews.com)

Maps in the brain

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I'm fascinated by this new post on the Psychology Today blogs, which suggests that children's drawings of the human body might tell us something about how the body is represented in the brain. The idea is that kids' characteristic distortions of the human shape, when they pick up a pencil to draw, reflect the varying importance of different body parts in their perception of the world. Children overemphasise hands, face and mouth because that's where they sense the world most vividly, with the result that their pictures look oddly like the somatosensory maps that neurobiologists have described in the brain. What do readers think?

Life after death?

Maybe.