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:

Linkpost for May

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things May 4, 2026

Fiddle Practice

For a while I wasn't learning how to play violin very well because whenever it was time to practice I didn't want to. I didn't really like practicing, because (1) it's boring, (2) I have better things to do, and (3) actually I guess there …

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts May 3, 2026

New Pony

I have a new pony. I got her from the Goodwill. Her name is "Rainbow" and her nickname is "Sparkles". We went the usual way, in the pink stroller. We went downstairs and I played with some of the toys. I found the pony in the toy area. …

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts May 3, 2026

more     (via openring)