On Friday, I discussed this study on national radio in Belgium, and we also already mentioned one of the major insights in our book on psychology, But it’s worth sharing here, too: this new study shows that babies learn to imitate others because they themselves are imitated by caregivers.

From the press release:

A study led by Professor Markus Paulus, Chair of Developmental Psychology and Educational Psychology at LMU, demonstrates that the ability has its roots in earliest childhood. “Children acquire their ability to imitate because they themselves are imitated by their caregivers,” says Markus Paulus.

Children are incredible imitators — thanks to their parents

For the study, the researchers looked at the interaction between mother and child over several months. The babies came into the lab for the first time at the age of 6 months, while their final visit was when they were 18 months old. As they engaged in various play situations, the interactions and imitations of mother and child were analyzed.

The longitudinal study shows that the more sensitive a mother was in her interactions with her six-month-old child and the more often she imitated the infant, the greater the child’s ability was at the age of 18 months to imitate others.

In the interaction between parents and child, mutual imitation is a sign of communication. Parents respond to the signals given by the child and reflect and amplify them. A mutual imitation of actions and gestures develops. “These experiences create connections between what the child feels and does on the one hand and what it sees on the other. Associations are formed. The child’s visual experience is connected to its own motor activity,” says Markus Paulus, explaining the neuro-cognitive process.

Children learn a variety of skills through imitation, such as how to use objects, cultural gestures like waving, and the acquisition of language. “Children are incredible imitators. Mimicry paves the way to their further development. Imitation is the start of the cultural process toward becoming human,” says Markus Paulus. In psychology, the theory that the ability to imitate is inborn held sway for a long time. The LMU study is further evidence that the ability is actually acquired.

The cultural transfer of knowledge is based on imitation

How well children learn to imitate others is crucially dependent on the sensitivity with which their parents respond to them. In this context, sensitivity is defined as the capability of a caregiver to pick up on the child’s signals and react promptly and appropriately to them. “The sensitivity of the mother is a predictor of how strongly she imitates her child,” says Dr. Samuel Essler, lead author of the study.

In addition, the study sheds light on what makes humans social beings, namely that our individual abilities only develop through interaction with others. Indeed, they owe their existence to the particular way in which humans raise their young.

“By being part of a social interaction culture, in which they are imitated, children learn to learn from others. Over the course of generations and millennia, this interplay has led to the cultural evolution of humans,” says Markus Paulus. “Through social learning, certain actions or techniques do not have to be constantly invented anew, but there is a cultural transfer of knowledge. Our results show that the ability to imitate, and thus cultural learning, is itself a product of cultural learning, in particular the parent-child interaction.”

Abstract of the study:

Humans are widely considered the most socially sophisticated species on the planet. Their remarkable abilities in navigating the social world have given rise to complex societies and the advancement of cultural intelligence. But what characterizes us as ultra-social beings? Theoretical advances in social sciences over the last century purport imitation as a central mechanism for the emergence of humans’ unique social-cognitive abilities. Uncovering the ontogeny of imitation is therefore paramount for understanding human cultural evolution. Yet, how humans become able to imitate is unclear and intensely debated. Recently, multidisciplinary findings have challenged long-standing assumptions that imitation is inborn. So what are the underlying processes supporting the development of imitation? One fascinating possibility is that infants become able to imitate by being imitated. Cognitive theories have suggested that by perceiving others imitating one’s own behavior, visual and motor representations of that behavior are coactivated and associated, leading to the emergence of imitation abilities.
Here, we show that being imitated by sensitive caregivers in infancy constitutes a psychological process giving rise to infants’ imitation abilities. Results demonstrated (1) that maternal imitation at 14 months positively predicted infants’ imitation abilities at 18 months and (2) that maternal imitation at 14 months mediated the positive effect of maternal sensitivity at 6 months on infants’ imitation abilities at 18 months. This offers substantial evidence for the role of social interactions in the emergence of imitation as a key factor for human cultural learning.