What do they know? And when do they know it?
We're not talking about politicians or cover-ups. Those are the basic questions that UW psychology professor Andrew N. Meltzoff has been working to answer about infant development.
A major discovery by Meltzoff published in 1977 showed that
newborn infants, only days old, could imitate the facial
expressions of adults.
Prior to that
time, conventional wisdom held that infants either could not
see well enough to imitate facial expressions, or they lacked
the mental and motor capacities necessary for copying the
behavior of adults.
The experiments were elaborately designed to avoid bias or spurious results. Babies were tested by showing them four different gestures: poking out the tongue, protruding the lips, opening the mouth, and finger movements. In all four categories, the babies produced more correct responses than not.
Meltzoff's discovery helped revise traditional theory and is
now part of virtually every introductory psychology textbook.
The finding, which received wide coverage in the print and
broadcast media at the time,
is now included
in standard reference works.
Older infants will imitate the actions they see on
television, Meltzoff further discovered. Babies as young as 14
months were able to learn how to manipulate a toy they had
never seen before by watching a demonstration on television.
That finding
overthrew the standard theory of perception, which held that it
took several years of experience with pictures, and perhaps
primitive language skills, to understand that two-dimensional
images can represent three-dimensional
reality.
Meltzoff's
findings suggest this is an early-developing skill in human
infancy: a primitive grasp of symbols that underlies language
rather than deriving from it.
The research findings have entered into national discussions about childhood television programming. Meltzoff's results suggest that television and computer screens have the potential to educate even very young children.
