Imitation: children learn by becoming others

The kitchen is warm with the smell of ghee and the soft hiss of the tawa. A grandmother sits on a low stool rolling rotis, and beside her on the floor a three-year-old girl has her own small lump of dough. Nobody gives her a lesson. She watches the old hands, presses her palms down and rocks a tiny rolling pin back and forth. Then she wipes her forehead with the back of her wrist, exactly as the old woman just did, though there is no flour on her face and no sweat. The roti comes out lopsided. The wrist was perfect.

What imitation means

Every Indian child hears “don’t copy” early, and learns with it that copying is what weak students do while good students understand. But look again at the girl in the kitchen. She is not tracing a shape from outside. She is taking another person’s way of moving into her own body and trying it on. For a few minutes she is her grandmother. Imitation in this sense is not a shortcut around thinking. It is one of the first ways a child thinks at all, with the whole body and not only the head, which is the larger claim of embodied cognition.

What the evidence shows, and where it is unsure

In 1977 Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore reported that babies 12 to 21 days old copied an adult’s tongue, mouth, lip and finger movements. Then in 2016 Janine Oostenbroek and her colleagues tested more than a hundred infants repeatedly over their first nine weeks, and found no reliable sign that newborns imitate faces, gestures or sounds. Their results fit better with Jean Piaget’s old view that imitation builds gradually through the first year. Newborn imitation is disputed, and no classroom claim should rest on it.

What comes a little later is firmer. In 1988 Meltzoff showed 14-month-olds an adult switching on a light panel by touching it with the forehead. The babies could not touch it. A week later, eight of the twelve did the same strange thing, while no child in the comparison groups tried it. Then György Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildikó Király found that when the adult’s hands were free, about seven in ten infants copied the head touch. When her hands held a blanket around her, only about one in five did, and the rest used their hands. Within the first two years, children are already asking, with their bodies, why someone moved the way they did.

By the preschool years the copying becomes almost stubborn. Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten showed chimpanzees and three- and four-year-olds how to open a reward box using some useless steps. When the box was see-through, the chimpanzees dropped them. The children kept them. Derek Lyons, Andrew Young and Frank Keil found that children aged three to five went on copying unnecessary actions even after being told directly to skip them. Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli found this overimitation among Bushman children in the Kalahari as much as in a large industrialised city.

What this changes in how we see a child

Why copy what is plainly useless? Because the child is not only learning to open a box. She is learning how things are done here. The wrist across the forehead is not a mistake. It belongs to the way roti is made in her house. Barbara Rogoff and her colleagues describe communities where children learn mainly by watching closely and joining in real work, and note that early language learning at home often works the same way. Our schools chose separate lessons instead. And then we wonder why a child who picked up a whole spoken language at home finds a textbook so slow.

The harder side shows in Albert Bandura’s experiment, where nursery-school children at Stanford watched an adult hit and shout at a large Bobo doll. Left alone afterwards, they hit and shouted too, and repeated the adult’s very words. Children do not copy only what we intend to teach. They take in the teacher’s patience and her irritation, the way she holds a book and the way she holds a stick.

Where this view parts ways

The usual case for imitation in education is instrumental. Model the method, children copy it, results improve. The claim here is different. Imitation tells us what a learner is. A child is not a closed mind receiving instructions. She is an open body that takes the shape of the bodies around her, and learning, at its root, is a kind of becoming. If that is so, a teacher’s body is never neutral. Her posture, her voice, her hurry or her calm are already a lesson, a large part of the hidden curriculum that no timetable lists.

Watch children playing school on a verandah after the last bell. One child is always the teacher. Listen to her voice and notice what she does when the “class” will not listen. She learnt all of it without a single lesson. What, then, are we teaching when we believe we are only teaching mathematics?

Put it into practice: P30 Mirror and shadow: learning by imitation; P22 Call and response: language through rhythm; P36 Telling a story with the body

Read next: R10 Participatory sense-making: how two bodies understand together; R43 Play: the body’s own curriculum

Notes

1. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198(4312), 74–78. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.897687
2. Oostenbroek, J., Suddendorf, T., Nielsen, M., Redshaw, J., Kennedy-Costantini, S., Davis, J., Clark, S., & Slaughter, V. (2016). Comprehensive longitudinal study challenges the existence of neonatal imitation in humans. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.03.047
3. Meltzoff, A. N. (1988). Infant imitation after a 1-week delay: Long-term memory for novel acts and multiple stimuli. Developmental Psychology, 24(4), 470–476.
4. Gergely, G., Bekkering, H., & Király, I. (2002). Rational imitation in preverbal infants. Nature, 415(6873), 755. https://doi.org/10.1038/415755a
5. Horner, V., & Whiten, A. (2005). Causal knowledge and imitation/emulation switching in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and children (Homo sapiens). Animal Cognition, 8, 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-004-0239-6
6. Lyons, D. E., Young, A. G., & Keil, F. C. (2007). The hidden structure of overimitation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(50), 19751–19756. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0704452104
7. Nielsen, M., & Tomaselli, K. (2010). Overimitation in Kalahari Bushman children and the origins of human cultural cognition. Psychological Science, 21(5), 729–736. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610368808
8. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Mejía Arauz, R., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175.
9. Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575–582.

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