People don’t waste much time becoming part of this social world. Babies can imitate behavior two to three weeks after they’re born, says developmental psychologist and APS Fellow and Charter Member Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington. In a 1977 issue of Science, decades before the term “mirror neurons” existed, Meltzoff published evidence that infants this young can imitate a mouth opening, a finger moving or a tongue peeking through lips. The discovery of mirror neurons was a neurophysiological explanation for the developmental behaviors Meltzoff had been noticing for decades.
“Human beings are not born exclusively with a set of reflexes or fixed action patterns,” says Meltzoff. “A key mechanism is learning from social others by observing.”
Meltzoff’s findings flew in the face of Jean Piaget’s solipsistic theories that people begin life in asocial isolation, slowly gaining an understanding of the relationship between the self and other. “Babies don’t become social,” Meltzoff says, “they’re social at birth.”
This early work set the stage for what he now calls the “Like Me” theory of child development. In the first months and years of life, babies realize that other people are like them. “From the moment we’re born, we’re organizing movement as ‘like me,’” or not like me, he says. “A tree blows, but it’s not moving like me. A ball flies, but it’s not moving like me. But a mother opens her hands, and suddenly the baby’s riveted. They can begin to learn.”
Over time, babies learn that they can act with intent and variety. They experience the ability to perform an action differently from the person they are imitating. Eventually they realize internal states, such as desire; further down the line they develop empathy.
The child-rearing implications for this work are powerful: Imitative social games, such as patty-cake, can help create the mental maps of others that lead to empathic feelings. “Empathy doesn’t emerge miraculously, as a virgin birth,” Meltzoff says. “It grows out of things that are simpler beginnings.”
Recently, however, Meltzoff and his colleague Betty Repacholi have found that infants aren’t simply sponges that absorb imitation only to spill it back out as processed. Infants as young as 18 months old can regulate their imitation, the researchers report in the March/April 2006 Child Development.
To test such regulation, the researchers played with an object in front of infant subjects. After a while, another person entered the room. Sometimes this person expressed anger toward the experimenter performing the task; other times, the person remained neutral.
After this person left the room, the infants were given the chance to play with the object. At this point, the person who had been either angry or neutral returned to the room. Infants who had seen the neutral person were more likely to play with the object than those who had witnessed the angry outbreak, the researchers report.
What’s more, infants who had seen an angry response were more likely to play with the object if the angry person either didn’t return to the room or faced away from the infant. The research, says Meltzoff, shows for the first time that 18-month-olds can modify their imitation on the basis of their surroundings.
“That’s what makes humans different from monkeys,” he says. “Mirror neurons show how what you see can be connected with what you do, but human beings can also regulate their behavior.”
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