NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research shows that while babies often imitate what older and wiser adults do, they go their own way when it makes sense.

In a study in the 1980s, researchers had found that when 14-month-olds watched an adult turn on a light-box by touching it with her head instead of her hand, most of them followed suit. But no baby in a "control" group was naturally inclined to use his or her noggin.

This was taken to mean that infants learn a new action by observing adults and then tend to automatically copy that action when they are in a similar situation.

But the authors of the new study bet that infants would diverge from their adult model if another approach seemed more rational to them. So Gyorgy Gergely of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and his colleagues put a twist in the light-box scenario.

In their study, 14-month-olds watched an adult turn the light-box on with her head--once when her hands were clearly occupied and once when her hands were free.

They found that when the demonstrator's hands were free, 69% of the babies mimicked her head action to turn on the light. But only 21% did so when the adult's hands were occupied, according to findings published in the February 14th issue of Nature.

According to the researchers, this suggests that when an adult chooses to use her head despite a pair of free hands, an infant may assume there is some advantage to using the head. In contrast, when the adult appears to be using her head because her hands are busy, most babies will apparently opt to use their own unoccupied hands.

"Unlike the adult's, their own hands were free, and so in their own situation touching the light-box with their hand seemed to be a more sensible approach," Gergely told Reuters Health.

The findings, according to the researcher, stand in contrast to what has been thought about infants' imitative learning--that they simply copy what they have seen adults do in the same situation.

"Our study," said Gergely, "shows that infants may be even smarter than that, and imitation of new means is not a simple automatic copying process. Rather, infants imitate new actions selectively."

This ability to evaluate the "sensibility" of different actions, he noted, is highly sophisticated and shows that babies have the capacity to use what they have learned to "achieve their own ends."

SOURCE: Nature 2002;415:755.

Reference Source 89

For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use
PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".