Flickr, andy pequeño Imitation games like pat-a-cake build on skills of copying another person’s actions and identifying body parts.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for adults, but for babies it's their foremost tool for learning. As renowned people-watchers, babies often observe others demonstrate how to do things and then copy those body movements. It's how little ones know, usually without explicit instructions, to hold a toy phone to the ear or guide a spoon to the mouth. Now researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University have found the first evidence revealing a key aspect of the brain processing that occurs in babies to allow this learning by observation. The finding s, published online Oct. 30 by PLOS ONE, are the first to show that babies' brains showed specific activation patterns when an adult performed a task with different parts of her body. When 14-month-old babies simply watched an adult use her hand to touch a toy, the hand area of the baby's brain lit up.
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