Derek's Blog Overimitation Now Appearing in PNAS
Yesterday proved to be an exciting milestone for me, as the first portion of my overimitation research was officially published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s been a long time coming, and I’d really like to thank my co-authors and friends Andrew Young (now in his first year of the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Professor Frank Keil for sharing all the hard work that helped to make it happen. I’d also like to thank Frank for graciously footing the additional cost of publishing the article as an “open access” submission. This means that anyone, anywhere can download the complete article from the PNAS website, without the need for a (very expensive) subscription. You can also check out the extensive online supporting information that we submitted to supplement the print article, including some really great video footage of children participating in the experiment. The videos are quite entertaining if I do say so myself, and they really help to convey what overimitation is in a way that’s hard to do in just words, so be sure to check them out.
You can access the PNAS article right here.
Also, if you’ve been reading this blog but haven’t yet ventured over to see the rest of the site, I hope you’ll take an opportunity to do so now. I’ve been working overtime to get the site up and running in time for the article’s release, and it’s been really fun to see the first wave of visitors rolling in as the overimitation story percolates its way across the internet. One of the real highlights so far has been having the story picked up by Carl Zimmer, the prominent science journalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times, among other places. I had the pleasure of meeting Carl for the first time about two years ago, when we wrote an article for the Times on the start of my research. It’s been fun then for me to see things come full-circle with his latest blog post about this work. You can read Carl’s comments on overimitation at his science blog, The Loom.
Returning to thinking about this site, as I’ve discussed in a few other contexts, my vision for Hello Felix is to create a trustworthy, authoritative source of news and information for anyone interested in learning more about the science of childhood development and learning - especially parents. Cognitive scientists are doing so much fascinating work on how kids think, I hope that this site will help to increase the level of interchange between the people who study kids in the research lab and the people who, well, raise them. It’s an exchange that would be a real benefit for everyone involved, I know, and a lot of fun at that. So please check it out!
Over time the site will be expanding to cover lots more topics and varieties of developmental psychology research, but as a starting point I’ve put together a nice guided tour of overimitation and imitative learning that I hope people will find useful.
As always, I’d love to hear any comments or feedback you might want to provide. Please feel free to comment on articles on the site (look for the links at the bottom of each page), or to send me an email directly. Also, I’m also pleased to say that the brand new Felix Forum is now up and running! I hope you’ll stop by to see what people are discussing, or better yet to start a discussion of your own. I’m online posting and answering questions each day, so all new user submissions are sure to get a quick response!
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