Imitation and Human Development--论文代写范文精选

对语言和思维阅读当然有所不同。第一部分关注的问题是模仿如何与其他思想的理解。这个问题将进一步发挥作用。迈尔左夫调查他的作品，在早期的模仿和利用，它认为早期的模仿和支持机制产生其他理解。下面的essay代写范文进一步详述。

Introduction
Human beings are distinctive among animals in their capacities for language and for understanding other minds, or mind reading. Whether these are innate as capacities, the skilled behavioral expression of these capacities develops over years of interaction between infants and their environments, in well-studied stages during which much learning occurs. The same could be said about a third distinctive human capacity, the ability to imitate. This, however, begins to be manifested very early—indeed, at birth, according to highly influential work by the developmental psychologist Andrew Meltzoff and others on imitation in human infants, including newborns.

The relationships among this trio of capacities—for language, mind reading, and imitation—are of fundamental importance for understanding the transition of human infants into adult persons. Does the development of either language or mind reading depend on imitation? If so, at what levels of description and in what senses of ‘‘depend’’? Or does dependence run the other way or both ways, dynamically? The answers are controversial, and may of course differ for language and mind reading. Several of the chapters in vol. 2, part I focus on the question of how imitation is related to the understanding of other minds and in particular other agents. This question brings into play the further controversy about whether mind reading is best understood as theorizing about other minds or as simulating them.

How does the theory–simulation controversy concerning the mechanism by which we understand other minds bear on the relationships between imitation and mind reading, or vice versa? Meltzoff surveys his work on early imitation and draws on it to argue that early imitation and its enabling mechanisms beget the understanding of other agents, not the other way around.20 In a series of famous experiments, Meltzoff and Moore studied imitation in newborns and infants under 1 month, including facial and manual imitation. Since infants can see others’ facial acts but not their own, newborn facial imitation suggests an innate, supramodal correspondence between observed acts and an observer’s similar acts.21 Moreover, very young infants defer imitation across a delay of 24 hours and correct their imitative responses, homing in on a match without external feedback.

The active intermodal mapping (AIM) hypothesis interprets this evidence in terms of the comparison and matching of proprioceptive feedback from an observer’s own acts to an observed target act, where these are coded in common, supramodal terms. Elsewhere, Meltzoff and Moore (1997) explicate this common code as initially coding for relations among bodily organs such as lips and tongue, and developing through experience of body babbling toward more dynamic, complex, and abstract coding. Meltzoff emphasizes that various further imitative and related behaviors are not present from birth, but are acquired at stages throughout infancy. Infants from 6 weeks to 14 months recognize that they are being imitated,22 but only older infants act in ways that apparently purposively test whether they are being imitated. Since only people can imitate systematically, an ability to recognize being imitated provides a means of recognizing that an entity is a person. By 14 months, infants imitate a modeled novel act after a week’s delay; they turn on a light by touching a touch-sensitive light panel with their foreheads instead of their hands, differentially copying the novel means modeled as well as the result (see Meltzoff, vol. 2, ch. 13, p. 59, and Tomasello and Carpenter, vol. 2, ch. 17, p. 138.) Note that in a follow-up to the Meltzoff’s light-pad experiment,

children do use their hands to touch the light-pad when they see a demonstrator whose hands are occupied by doing something else touch it with her head (Gergely et al., 2002). Children can emulate as well as imitate. Nevertheless, their tendency to imitate rather than emulate appears to be considerably greater than that of chimps when direct comparisons have been made, as in Nagell et al., 1993. By 15 or 18 months, infants recognize the underlying goal of an unsuccessful act they see modeled and produce it using various means. For example, after seeing an adult try but fail to pull a dumbbell apart in her hands, they succeed in pulling it apart using their knees as well as their hands.

However, they do not recognize and attempt to bring about the goals of failed ‘‘attempts’’ from similar movements by inanimate devices. Thus, in Meltzoff’s view, the ability to understand other minds has innate foundations but develops in stages. Imitation plays a critical role in his arguments for a middle ground between Fodorian nativism and Piagetian theory. Infants have a primitive ability to recognize being imitated and to imitate, and hence to recognize people as different from other things and to recognize equivalences between the acts of self and other. The initial bridge between self and other provides a basis for access to people that we do not have to things, which is developed in an early three-stage process.

First, an infant’s own acts are linked to others’ similar acts supramodally, as evidenced by newborns’ imitation of others’ facial acts. Second, own acts of certain kinds are linked bidirectionally to own experiences of certain kinds through learning. Third, others’ similar acts are linked to others’ similar experiences. This process gets mind reading started on understanding agency and the mental states most directly associated with it: desires, intentions, perceptions, and emotions. The ability to understand other minds is not all or nothing, as Meltzoff emphasizes.23 An understanding of mental states that are further from action, such as false beliefs, comes later in development.

Meltzoff claims here that the early three-stage process he describes is not a matter of formal reasoning, but rather one of processing the other as ‘‘like me.’’ Meltzoff is often interpreted as viewing mind reading in terms of theoretical inferences from first-person mind-behavior links to similar third-person links, in an updating of classical arguments from analogy. There are clear elements of first-to-third-person inference in his view of how mind reading develops. As he states in vol. 2, ch. 1, ‘‘the crux of the ‘like-me’ hypothesis is that infants may use their own intentional actions as a framework for interpreting the intentional actions of others’’ (p. 75).

For example, 12-month-old infants follow the ‘‘gaze’’ of a model significantly less often when the model’s eyes are closed than when they are open, but do not similarly refrain from following the ‘‘gaze’’ of blindfolded models until they are given first-person experience with blindfolds. Similarly, as Paul Harris comments, giving 3-month-old infants Velcro mittens to enhance their grasping abilities also enhances their ability to recognize others’ goals in grasping. Nevertheless, the initial self–other linkage that Meltzoff postulates, expressed in imitation by newborns, is via a supramodal common code for observed acts and the observer’s acts, which is direct and noninferential (see Meltzoff & Moore, 1997). In a graded view of mind reading such as Meltzoff’s, the role of theoretical inference from the first to the third person in mind reading can enter at later stages and increase significantly with development.

Philosopher Alvin Goldman also considers the relationship between imitation and mind reading, first from the perspective that understands mind reading in terms of theorizing, which he attributes to Meltzoff, and then from his preferred view of mind reading in terms of simulation. The ‘‘theory theory’’ approach to mind reading regards commonsense psychology as a kind of protoscientific theory in which knowledge is represented in the form of laws about mental states and behavior; to the degree that these are not innate, they are discovered by testing hypotheses against evidence. People’s specific mental states and behaviors are inferred from other mental states and behaviors by means of such laws. No copying is involved.

By contrast, simulation theories understand mind reading to start with the mind reader taking someone else’s perspective and generating pretend mental or behavioral states that match the other person’s. These are not made the object of theoretical inference, but rather are used as inputs to the simulator’s own psychological processes, including decision-making processes, while these are held offline, producing simulated mental states and behavior as output. The simulated outputs are then assigned to the other person; these may be predicted behaviors by the other, or mental states of the other that explain the observed behaviors. This is an extension of practical abilities rather than a theoretical exercise. The simulator copies the states of the other and uses the copies as inputs to her own psychological equipment, instead of formulating laws and making inferences from them about the other. Within this broad theory versus simulation contrast.（essay代写)

51Due网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文著作权归51Due所有；未经51Due官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯著作权现象，51Due保留一切法律追诉权。
更多essay代写范文欢迎访问我们主页 www.51due.com 当然有essay代写需求可以和我们24小时在线客服 QQ:800020041 联系交流。-X（essay代写)