Stepping Stones: My Opinion

[laurenfuentes]

I thought that the Meltzoff and Gopnik article aptly addressed the role of imitation in the development of the idea of intention and the understanding of other’s mental states. The information presented in the article fit well with my personal understanding of infant cognitive development: that the child is born with certain cognitive abilities, not such that he is able to understand the world directly after birth, rather that these abilities allow the child to take in the world around him in the most efficient way and build his knowledge on the presented information. Just like in the other Meltzoff article with the imitated facial features, I believe that children imitate other’s behavior more so as a reflex. This innate reflex (present minutes after birth) sort of gets the child going in terms of understanding their own behavior and eventually in relation to the behavior of others as well. The Meltzoff and Gopnik article argues that “early imitation is relevant to developing theories of mind because it provides the first, primordial instance of infants’ making a connection between the visible world of others and the infants’ own internal states, the way they ‘feel’ themselves to be”. In other words, children imitate, learn feelings and intentions behind their own actions and transpose these ideas onto the interpretations of others’ actions. The “like me” idea fits in well here too.
Getting back to my interpretation of cognitive development, I believe that when we are born we have almost no idea of what a “like me” is— we are only born with the capacity to understand “like me” through the cognitive tools we are given. We only develop the “like me” idea when we see someone else doing something and in imitating them, we find that we can do the same thing. So, when the child is very young, “like me” is a very small category, one that I am inclined to call “just like me”. In this category, the other’s action, say a hand movement, must be imitable by the child and the hand must be, on all sensory accounts, very similar to the child’s. It is only here that the child can learn to assign intention to the person. After this “just like me” category is constructed, I believe that children can learn to assign intention to other people, animals, etc., essentially to all animated beings not in the “just like me” category. I think that the rigid guidelines that children operate on to determine what is “just like me” sort of simplify and become less specific through experience and learning so that eventually the child has a set of guidelines to determine if the other is capable of intention, much like those we were trying to come up with in class. I think the trouble we ran into in coming up with those guidelines was that we were thinking about this ability to determine if another is capable of intention as if remained the same throughout infancy. What I am arguing is rather that there is a progression along which this ability matures and that when discussing this ability, we ought to also address where the infant is in this progression in order to gain a clearer picture.
After getting my opinion out there I also wanted to quickly address the autism topic covered in the paper as a jumping off point for discussion tomorrow. I was a bit troubled by the way the authors went about using autism as an example as I have always understood the syndrome to be on a spectrum. The article failed to note the pervasiveness of the autism they studied and how imitative performance might vary across the spectrum. On page 353, the authors site Ohta (1987) saying that in a comparative study of imitation between autistic and non-autistic children, autistic children performed, “as if they did not register human actions within the same body-scheme framework as normally-developing children”. This is as if to say that autistic and non-autistic children (to say that non-autistic children are normal really does not sit well with me) have a different body-scheme framework. How then can the authors address the spectrum question if there are two distinct frameworks? Are there sort of “normal”/autistic frameworks for children midway on the autism spectrum? What other problems come up in fitting the Meltzoff and Gopnik argument to spectrum of autism?

[Jessiebanana]

It would interesting to know if children with autism throughout the spectrum failed equally, or on a spectrum of the imitation task. I don't know why I tend to believe that despite the spectrum, including aspergers, they would fail evenly. But than they might not have made note of the spectrum because at that age some infants who are on the less severe side might not be detected at all.