What Do Babies Know?

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available as a tool. The key element in that discovery was the baby's desire to imitate its mother's facial movements. Jean Piaget, the celebrated Swiss psychologist who pioneered in this field with extended studies of his own three children, declared that such imitations began only at about eight to twelve months. Earlier than that, he reasoned, the baby could not understand that its own face was similar to that of its mother.

Olga Maratos, a Greek student who was testing seven-week-old infants for her doctorate, went to Piaget's house one snowy day early in 1973 to tell him of her progress. "Do you remember what I am doing?" she said. "I am sticking out my tongue at the babies, and do you know what they are doing?" "You may tell me," Piaget murmured. "They are sticking out their tongues right back at me! What do you think of that?"

The venerable professor puffed on his pipe for a moment as he contemplated the challenge to his theory. "I think that's very rude," he said.

Maratos' thesis was never published, so the credit for the discovery went mainly to two young psychologists who now teach at the University of Washington, Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore. Their study, published in 1977, showed that babies only twelve days old could imitate an adult sticking out a tongue. Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated that if a pacifier in the baby's mouth prevented the infant from imitating the adult, it would remember what it wanted to do until the pacifier was removed; then the baby would promptly stick out its tongue.

That first study by Meltzoff and Moore aroused considerable skepticism, so they repeated and elaborated it in 1981, eliminating all uncertainties and using still younger children. "We had one baby 42 minutes old, with blood still on its hair," recalls Meltzoff. "We washed it and tested it. We found that even newborns could imitate adults."

These experiments demonstrated the infant's very early capacity for what psychologists call "intermodal perception"—that is, to combine the brain's perceptions of two different activities, in this case vision and muscular action, which is virtually the first form of thinking. Says Yale's Kessen: "The past 15 to 20 years have demonstrated that the child has a mind. The next several years will be used to find out how it works."

Meltzoff pursued his exploration of intermodal perception by a different test of vision and touch. He gave ordinary pacifiers to a group of month-old babies and pacifiers with bumps on them to another group. He then had the babies look at models of the two kinds of nipples. The result, says Meltzoff, was that "they would look at the ones they had felt." Now, with Speech Professor Patricia Kuhl, he has extended those tests to language. The researchers showed infants two films of faces saying "ahh" and "eee," then placed between the two pictures a loudspeaker that could make either sound. The babies invariably looked toward the picture that fit the sound. "This means that babies can detect the relationship between mouth movements and the sounds they hear," says Meltzoff. "Essentially, babies are lip readers."

As they begin to develop this rudimentary capacity for thinking, babies develop an