Repeat after me: imitation is the sincerest form of perception

Science News, May 24, 2003 by Bruce Bower

Enemy soldiers captured Army Private First Class Jessica Lynch when her convoy got lost during the opening days of the Iraq war. But her destiny took a dramatic turn for the better when an Iraqi man whom she had never met saw one of the captors slap Lynch's face twice as she lay wounded in a hospital. In news accounts, the Iraqi man, a lawyer, recounted the scene by motioning with his right hand as if he were slapping someone. He said, "My heart cut," an expression comparable to "My heart stopped." At that point, he put his hand over his chest and grimaced.

After seeing Lynch, the 32-year-old man walked 6 miles to find U.S. Marines and tell them about the female prisoner. At their request, he returned to the hospital to gather information on its layout and the number of Iraqi soldiers in the building. After the man returned and drew maps of the hospital and its vicinity for the Marines, U.S. forces rescued Lynch.

This tale of bravery hinged on the Iraqi man's visceral, emotional adoption of the vulnerable prisoner's perspective. Instances of one person participating in another's mental and physical experience dramatically. Researchers are now trying to understand how perspective shifts of this kind, in people and perhaps in other animals as well, grow out of an apparently brain-based aptitude for copycatting.

There's nothing new about the scientific appeal of this issue. More than a century ago, Charles Darwin wrote detailed accounts of mimicry in animals and theorized that many creatures respond to the emotional states of their comrades. In 1903, German psychologist Theodore Lipps wined the term that translates as "emphathy" and literally means "feeling into." Lipps theorized that the perception of another individual's emotional expression or gesture automatically activates the same emotion in the perceiver.

Current research efforts focus on imitation--an individual's recreation of another's actions--as the backbone of empathy, the capacity to infer whet others are feeling or thinking. This line of research, traces its origins to surprising reports in the 1970s that even some newborn babies can mimic various facial movements. Investigators received another jolt in 1996, with the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys. These cells emit comparable electrical signals when monkeys perform an action and when they observe another animal execute the same action.

The existence of both infant end neural mimicry fueled the conviction that the brain contains a single code for perceiving the world and acting in it. This idea also has a long history, although it has usually taken a backseat to the notion that perceptions stimulate thoughts, which then guide behavior in a chain reaction of separate processes.

Much of the latest thinking on imitation gets aired in The Imitative Mind (A.N. Meltzoff and W. Prinz, editors, Cambridge University Press, 2002). New findings were also presented on March 31 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in New York.

"We're reviving some old concepts about the mind with modern neuroscience," says Marco Iacoboni of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "There's much we don't know, but empathy seems to involve the mirroring of another person's emotional responses in one's own brain."

THEY'RE WATCHING Babies aren't big empathizers. Yet when it comes to imitating others, they hit the ground running.

A 1977 study directed by psychologist Andrew N. Meltzoff of the University of Washington in Seattle found that 2-to-3-week-old infants avidly reproduced an adult's facial movements, such as sticking out their tongues and opening their lips. Meltzoff has since documented infant imitation of abroad range of acts, including band gestures, eye blinking, and head movements. Even some newborns, ranging in age from 42 minutes to 3 days, have aped adults' faces in his experiments.

A baby's mimicry of, say, an adult sticking out his tongue to one side usually begins with halting tongue movements. Nevertheless, the desired tongue protrusion gradually emerges, even without any adult encouragement.

Infants rapidly move on to imitate all sorts of novel acts, such as touching one's forehead to a box that then lights up. Junior imitators also pay particularly close attention to the results rather than the details of actions. For instance, after watching a woman perform the forehead-to-box routine while holding a blanket around her shoulders, most 14-month-olds light the box by touching it with their hands (SN: 2/28/02, p. 125). These youngsters apparently figure that the woman had her own reason for not using her hands on the box and opt for the simpler approach.

"Babies are interpreters of our actions," Meltzoff says. "Even imitation by 1-month-old infants is voluntary and goal-directed." It shocks parents when they realize that "the babies are watching us," he notes.

Meltzoff theorizes that, beginning at birth, the human brain contains a mechanism for both observing and executing what others do.