Abstract
There is more to faces than meets the eye. Infants can see the faces of others, but can also feel their own faces move. We propose a cross-modal hypothesis about why faces are attractive and meaningful to infants. According to this view, faces are attention-getting in part because they look like infants’ own felt experiences. This cross-modal correspondence drives not only visual attention but also action. Infants produce facial acts they see others perform. We here report an experiment on the efficacy of mothers versus strangers in eliciting facial imitation. The development of imitation is also investigated. The results show that there is no disappearance or “drop out” of imitation in early infancy; however, infants develop social expectations about face-to-face interaction that sometimes supersede imitation. Special procedures are required to motivate imitative responding in the 2- to 3-month age range. A theory is proposed about the motivation and functional significance of early facial imitation. According to this theory early imitation subserves a social identity function. Infants treat the facial behaviors of people as identifiers of who they are and use imitative reenactments as a means of verifying the identity of people. Facial imitation and the neural bases of the multimodal representation of faces provide interesting problems in developmental cognitive neuroscience.
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Meltzoff, A.N., Moore, M.K. (1993). Why Faces are Special to Infants — on Connecting the Attraction of Faces and Infants’ Ability for Imitation and Cross-Modal Processing. In: de Boysson-Bardies, B., de Schonen, S., Jusczyk, P., McNeilage, P., Morton, J. (eds) Developmental Neurocognition: Speech and Face Processing in the First Year of Life. NATO ASI Series, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8234-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8234-6_18
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