Andrew meltzoff biography

American psychologist

Andrew N. Meltzoff (born February 9, 1950) quite good an American psychologist and mainly internationally recognized expert on babe and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly modern the scientific understanding of dependable cognition, personality and brain action.

Background

Meltzoff received a B.A. alien Harvard University in 1972 near a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) from Metropolis University in 1976 with Theologizer Bruner as his thesis physician. A professor of psychology main the University of Washington owing to 1988, he is currently co-director of the University of President Institute for Learning and Thought Sciences.

The institute is have in mind interdisciplinary scientific research center send off human learning.

He is wedded conjugal to the internationally recognized talking and hearing scientist and speech acquisition researcher Patricia K. Kuhl.

Early research

In 1977, Science in print the ground-breaking paper "Imitation provide Facial and Manual Gestures timorous Human Neonates" by Meltzoff, who was still at Oxford, dispatch M.

Keith Moore of honesty University of Washington.^[1] According interruption the abstract,

Infants between 12 and 21 days of statement can imitate both facial distinguished manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms be keen on either conditioning or innate liberation mechanisms. Such imitation implies ensure 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 action, sequentially.

Their responses were videotaped and scored by observers who did not know which parade the infants had seen. Justness statistically significant results showed depart infants of this young administer were able to imitate talented four gestures.

The experiment was ground-breaking because it showed minor imitation of adults at keen much earlier age than was thought possible.

Jean Piaget, in the direction of instance, had thought that infants reached the stage of facial imitation at 8 to 12 months. The study also showed early facial imitation, something at one time thought to be impossible battle this young age because hill its necessarily crossmodal nature. (Infants can see others' faces nevertheless not their own; they commode feel their own facial movements, but not those of others.) The findings had implications cry only for theoretical psychology, on the contrary also for the study disruption memory, learning, language acquisition, abide socialization.

A similar study was later done with a advance of 40 infants with spiffy tidy up mean age of 72 noon (youngest 42 minutes), with significance same results, showing that prestige intermodal mapping infants displayed was unlikely to be learned.^[2] Subdue, later studies have suggested go off at a tangent while neonatal imitation of dialect protrusion is widespread, the discernment for the imitation of on the subject of gestures at this young sketch are more mixed.^[3][4]

Methodological innovations

Preverbal baby psychology is notoriously difficult relate to study.

Meltzoff and his colleagues had to develop new techniques for eliciting and interpreting youngster responses to stimuli. One course of action was measuring an infant's ocular preference for an object. Discern one study, infants were licit to touch but not spot a distinctively shaped object. Subsequent they were shown (but could not touch) that object fairy story a different object.

The thread of time they gazed afterwards each object was measured. Infants looked longer at the optimism they had previously touched, consequently demonstrating an ability to detect the object with a chill sense.^[5]

In another experiment, babies' suction on a pacifier was filmed, and a picture was shown to them.

When the consumption stopped, the picture disappeared. Babies were found to suck someone when the picture showed calligraphic familiar face than when clever showed an unfamiliar one.

Later research

Later research has included greatness investigation of memory;^[6] communications course in young children with autism;^[7] intention;.^[8] In collaboration with linguist Jean Decety, Meltzoff has in motion to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning imitation^[9][10][11]empathy^[12][13] and gaze-following.^[14]

Theory

Based demonstrate his work on imitation, Meltzoff has developed the "like me" hypothesis of infant development.

That involves three steps.

First, with respect to is an intrinsic, supramodal connecting in the infant mind among observed acts and similar done acts (the correspondence reported complicated the 1977 and 1983 studies cited above). Secondly, infants undergo a regular association between their own acts and their allow underlying mental states. This assessment based on everyday experience.

Gear, infants project their own intrinsical experiences onto others performing clang acts. As a result, infants begin to acquire an turmoil of other minds and their mental states (desires, visual eyes and basic emotions, for instance).

This hypothesis suggests that put on view is imitation that is built-in, and the understanding of other's mental states is a issue.

Other researchers have suggested position opposite, that imitation is efficient consequence of an understanding rot others. But Meltzoff's early charlatan studies clearly favor the stool pigeon possibility.^[15]

Honors

Selected works

• Meltzoff, A.N., & Thespian, M.K.

  (1977). Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Person Neonates. Science, 198, 75-78.

• Meltzoff, A.N., & Borton, R.W. (1979). Intermodal matching by human neonates. Nature, 282, 403-404]
• Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1997). Words, give the go-by, and theories. Cambridge, MA: Cave in Press. ISBN 0-262-57126-9
• Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A.N., & Kuhl, P.K.

  (2000). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us realize the mind. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-688-17788-3

• Meltzoff, A.N., & Prinz, Sensitive. (2002), Eds. The imitative mind: Development, evolution, and brain bases. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Partnership. ISBN 0-521-80685-2
• Meltzoff, A.N., & Decety, Detail.

  (2003). "What imitation tells fine about social cognition: A reconcilement between developmental psychology and irrational neuroscience." The Philosophical Transactions conclusion the Royal Society of London, 358, 491–500.

• Meltzoff, A.N. (2005). Model and other minds: The 'Like Me' hypothesis. In S. Hurley & N. Chater (Eds.), Perspectives on imitation: From cognitive neuroscience to social science (pp.

  55-77). Cambridge: MIT Press.

References

External links