It has been a popular belief for a very long time that babies copy their parents, or anyone that surrounds them the gestures they make. Example of this is the poking of the tongue, the smiling and the making of monotonous sounds.
For many years, this has been a very popular belief and no study was ever done to bust this belief, until now that is because according to a brand new study published in Current Biology, babies don't actually imitate gestures.
Largely assumed by society that gestures around babies are highly important for their human social cognition and learning, but new evidence from the study supports that this claim is mostly anecdotal. To prove there point Virginia Slaughter, lead researcher of the study, together with her colleagues got a total of 106 infants exposed to a variety of facial expression, gesture, and sounds created by human and non-human models for a full minute while researchers observe reciprocal response.
In the long course of the study, researchers found that there isn't any correlation to the gestures that humans make and what babies make. They found little to no evidence that the newborns were capable of copying gestures, movements or vocalizations.
The researchers did notice one gesture that seems to be highly present with newborns and this is tongue poking, but they have observe that newborns tend to this a lot and is normal amongst the newborn. "The results provided evidence against the view that certain human behaviours are innate," said Slaughter in a statement.
"Analysis indicated infants were just as likely to produce gestures in response to other stimuli as to matching models. Human children in later stages do copy others' actions, but the controversial assumption that this occurs from the moment of birth needs to be rethought."
