Sticking out your tongue at babies

July 4th, 2012
cogsci
How much of what we know is learned and how much is inate is a really old question. Do we learn to use our senses and interpret the world from experience, or are we born knowing it? In college I believed we were born nearly a blank slate and that everything we knew was just a matter of applying powerful learning processes to our sensory input. And then a I read a paper:


Imitation of Human and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates

Meltzoff and Moore experimented with making faces at infants [1], looking for imitation. They found it: when the experimenter stuck out their tongue, the baby was more likely than chance to do the same. Which is actually amazing: think about all the steps it takes for them to do this. They need to have a connection between their eyes seeing a change in the experimenter's mouth and activating the muscles in their own mouth in just the right way as to duplicate the gesture. This shattered my previous understanding of neural development, where babies learn how to interpret their senses and move their muscles with lots of practice and experimentation. There is certainly still some of that, but this shows several complex systems are working and connected right after the eyes get their first look at the world.


[1] They later repeated this experiment with newborns under 72 hours old and got similar results. (Imitation in Newborn Infants: Exploring the Range of Gestures Imitated and the Underlying Mechanisms)

Referenced in: Mind Changing Writing

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Three cheers for the tomboy chaser

Three cheers for the tomboy chaser!

via Thing of Things January 30, 2026

2025-26 New Year review

This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Highlights include a minimal group house, the usefulness…

via Victoria Krakovna January 19, 2026

Why I Don't Think My Braces Were Worth It

A couple weeks ago, I got my braces off. I kind of wish I had never had them, though. When I was younger, two of my teeth were sticking out, and they looked kind of funny. I thought that my teeth were just fine, and I didn't want to get braces. But s…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts January 3, 2026

more     (via openring)