Word: meltzoff
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This is borne out by a new study of 96 babies conducted by Andrew Meltzoff and Rechele Brooks at the University of Washington. Meltzoff and Brooks knew that long before babies learn to talk, they form emotional connections with parents and caregivers by looking into their eyes. But there's a big cognitive leap between looking at someone's eyes and following that person's gaze to see what he or she is looking at. By tracking at what age babies learn to follow an adult's gaze, Meltzoff and Brooks have been able to establish an early indicator...
...Babies read their mother's faces," explains Meltzoff, co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind. "Being able to read other people and their intentions and to know what they're thinking about is key to language development...
...autistic spectrum have in developing a theory of mind. That's psychologese for the realization, which most children come to by the age of 4, that other people have thoughts, wishes and desires that are not mirror images of their own. As University of Washington child psychologist Andrew Meltzoff sees it, the developmental stage known as the terrible twos occurs because children--normal children, anyway--make the hypothesis that their parents have independent minds and then, like proper scientists, set out to test...
...Meltzoff believes that this lack can be traced to the problem that autistic children have in imitating the adults in their lives. If an adult sits down with a normal 18-month-old and engages in some interesting behavior--pounding a pair of blocks on the floor, perhaps, or making faces--the child usually responds by doing the same. Young children with autism, however, do not, as Meltzoff and his colleague Geraldine Dawson have shown in a series of playroom experiments...
...failure can be serious. In the early years of life, imitation is one of a child's most powerful tools for learning. It is through imitation that children learn to mouth their first words and master the rich nonverbal language of body posture and facial expression. In this way, Meltzoff says, children learn that drooping shoulders equal sadness or physical exhaustion and that twinkling eyes mean happiness or perhaps mischievousness...