BRISBANE, Australia, May 6 (UPI) -- The long-held theory that young infants imitate the facial features and movements of their parents is wrong, say researchers in Australia and England.
In a study with more than 100 infants, researchers at the University Queensland and several universities in England found the babies are not sticking their tongues out in response to their parents, but that any response before a certain age is a relatively random movement.
The researchers suggest changing, if not dropping outright, the idea that humans are born with the ability to imitate, saying the study suggests imitation is an ability developed after birth.
"Many assume that we are 'special' because we inherit a set of complex cognitive mechanisms," Dr. Cecilia Heyes, a cognitive science researchers at the University of Oxford, said in a press release.
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"Imitation was one of the things that set us apart, along with language, mental time travel, cheater detection, face recognition and theory of mind. Now that we know imitation is not inborn there is renewed impetus for testing other hypotheses. At birth, human minds may only be different to those of other animals in subtle ways."
For the study, published in the journal Current Biology, researchers recruited 106 infants, measuring responses to nine social and two non-social cues at 1, 3, 6 and 9 weeks of age.
Analysis of experiments with the infants revealed they were as likely to reproduce gestures -- such as facial expressions, sticking out their tongues or making sounds -- in a control model as they were to imitate a matching model, suggesting the ability to imitate is not innate at birth.
"The results provided evidence against the view that certain human behaviors are innate," said Dr. Virginia Slaughter, a researcher at the University of Queensland. "Analysis indicated infants were just as likely to produce gestures in response to other stimuli as to matching models. Human children in later stages do copy others' actions, but the controversial assumption that this occurs from the moment of birth needs to be rethought."
