Andrew N. Meltzoff
Encyclopedia
Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development
Child development
Child development stages describe theoretical milestones of child development. Many stage models of development have been proposed, used as working concepts and in some cases asserted as nativist theories....

. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition, personality and brain development
Neural development
Neural development comprises the processes that generate, shape, and reshape the nervous system, from the earliest stages of embryogenesis to the final years of life. The study of neural development aims to describe the cellular basis of brain development and to address the underlying mechanisms...

.

Background

Meltzoff received a B.A. from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1972 and a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) from Oxford University in 1976. A professor of psychology at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 since 1988, he is currently co-director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. The Institute is an interdisciplinary scientific research center on human learning.

He is married to the internationally recognized speech and hearing scientist and language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...

 researcher Patricia K. Kuhl
Patricia K. Kuhl
Patricia K. Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in...

.

Early research

In 1977, Science published the ground-breaking paper "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" by Meltzoff, who was still at Oxford, and M. Keith Moore of the University of Washington. According to the abstract,

Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms. Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate their own unseen behaviors with gestures they see others perform.


Six infants were each shown three facial gestures and one manual gesture, sequentially. Their responses were videotaped and scored by observers who did not know which gesture the infants had seen. The statistically significant results showed that infants of this young age were able to imitate all four gestures.

The experiment was ground-breaking because it showed infant imitation of adults at a much earlier age than was thought possible. Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....

, for instance, had thought that infants reached the stage of facial imitation at 8 to 12 months. The study also showed early facial imitation, something previously thought to be impossible at this young age because of its necessarily crossmodal nature. (Infants can see others' faces but not their own; they can feel their own facial movements, but not those of others.) The findings had implications not only for theoretical psychology, but also for the study of memory, learning, language acquisition, and socialization.

A similar study was later done with a group of 40 infants with a mean age of 72 hours (youngest 42 minutes), with the same results, showing that the intermodal mapping
Intermodal mapping
Intermodal mapping is the ability, inborn according to research, to recognize stimuli using a sense different from the one it was originally presented to. This implies that stimuli are represented universally in the brain and available to all senses and need not be learned by pairing ....

 infants displayed was unlikely to be learned. However, later studies have suggested that while neonatal imitation of tongue protrusion is widespread, the findings for the imitation of other gestures at this young age are more mixed.

Methodological innovations

Preverbal infant psychology is notoriously difficult to study. Meltzoff and his colleagues had to develop new techniques for eliciting and interpreting infant responses to stimuli. One method was measuring an infant's visual preference for an object. In one study, infants were allowed to touch but not see a distinctively shaped object. Later they were shown (but could not touch) that object and a different object. The length of time they gazed at each object was measured. Infants looked longer at the object they had previously touched, thus demonstrating an ability to recognize the object with a different sense.

In another experiment, babies' sucking on a pacifier was recorded, and a picture was shown to them. When the sucking stopped, the picture disappeared. Babies were found to suck longer when the picture showed a familiar face than when it showed an unfamiliar one.

Later research

Later research has included the investigation of memory; communications development in young children with autism
Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...

; intention;. In collaboration with neuroscientist Jean Decety
Jean Decety
Jean Decety is a neuroscientist and an internationally recognized expert on cognitive neuroscience and social neuroscience. His research focuses on the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly empathy, sympathy, emotional self-regulation and more generally...

, Meltzoff has started to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning imitation empathy
Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...

 and gaze-following.

Theory

Based on his work on imitation, Meltzoff has developed the "like me" hypothesis of infant development. This involves three steps. First, there is an intrinsic, supramodal connection in the infant mind between observed acts and similar executed acts (the correspondence reported in the 1977 and 1983 studies cited above). Secondly, infants experience a regular association between their own acts and their own underlying mental states. This is based on everyday experience. Third, infants project their own internal experiences onto others performing similar acts. As a result, infants begin to acquire an understanding of other minds
Problem of other minds
The problem of other minds has traditionally been regarded as an epistemological challenge raised by the skeptic. The challenge may be expressed as follows: given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The thought behind the question is that no matter...

 and their mental states (desires, visual perception
Visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...

 and basic emotions, for instance).

This hypothesis suggests that it is imitation that is inborn, and the understanding of other's mental states is a consequence. Other researchers have suggested the opposite, that imitation is a consequence of an understanding of others. But Meltzoff's early imitation studies clearly favor the former possibility.

Honors

  • National Institutes of Health MERIT Award
  • Outstanding Research Award, Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics
  • Kenneth Craig Award in Psychology, Cambridge University
    University of Cambridge
    The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

    , England, 2005
  • Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
    Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
    The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway.-History:The University of Oslo was established in 1811. The idea of a learned society in Christiania surfaced for the first time in 1841. The city of Throndhjem had no university, but had a learned...

    .

Selected works


External links

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