Development
Does experience help babies learn to mimic others?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Infants are more likely to copy the facial expressions and hand movements they have had more practice seeing and performing themselves.
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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