Does experience help babies learn to mimic others?
Infants are more likely to copy the facial expressions and hand movements they have had more practice seeing and performing themselves.
Source
The role of sensorimotor experience in the development of mimicry in infancy
What they did
Researchers measured facial and hand mimicry in four-month-old infants using electromyography while they watched videos of models performing various movements. Next, they recorded a brief face-to-face play session between mothers and their infants to assess how often mothers naturally imitated their babies' expressions. They also measured how much interest and time infants spent looking at their own hands during this play session.
What they found
The study found that a mother's tendency to imitate her baby's facial expressions was significantly and positively correlated with the infant's tendency to mimic facial movements. Infants whose mothers frequently imitated them showed measurable facial mimicry, whereas those with less imitative mothers did not. Furthermore, infants who spent more time looking at their own hands demonstrated a stronger tendency to mimic hand gestures, suggesting that physical experience is linked to mimicry.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Because the study design is correlational, it cannot definitively prove that maternal imitation or hand-watching directly causes the development of mimicry in infants. The findings are also based on a small sample of fewer than thirty infants, which limits the generalizability of these results. Additionally, the results provide only tentative evidence for action-specific learning, since maternal imitation of mouth movements unexpectedly correlated with infant mimicry of both mouths and eyebrows.
Key terms
- Mimicry
- The spontaneous and unconscious copying of another person's behaviors or expressions.
- Electromyography (EMG)
- A technique used to measure the electrical activity of muscles, which can detect subtle movements not visible to the naked eye.
- Perceptual-motor coupling
- The neural connection between seeing an action performed by someone else and executing that same action oneself.
- Mirror Neuron System (MNS)
- A network of brain regions that activates both when performing an action and when observing someone else perform it.
- Perceptually opaque actions
- Movements, such as facial expressions, that a person cannot directly observe themselves performing.
- Perceptually transparent actions
- Movements, like hand gestures, that a person can easily see themselves perform.
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What is the primary claim of the sensorimotor learning account regarding the development of perceptual-motor couplings?
Common questions
Why did the researchers use EMG instead of just watching the infants?
EMG allows researchers to detect very subtle, sub-threshold muscle activity that is completely invisible to the human eye, providing a highly sensitive measure of mimicry.
Why does eye contact matter for infant mimicry?
Direct gaze acts as a social cue that enhances mimicry, helping the infant recognize that the observed action is socially relevant to them.
Did babies with highly imitative mothers mimic hand movements too?
No, maternal facial imitation did not correlate with hand mimicry, suggesting that babies only develop mimicry for the specific types of actions they have personally experienced.
How do infants learn to mimic facial expressions if they cannot see their own faces?
When a parent imitates the infant's expression, the infant gets visual feedback of the face while experiencing the motor feeling of making that face, helping them connect the two.
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