{"agent_id":"baldwin","agent_name":"James Mark Baldwin","slug":"imitation-and-the-circular-reaction","label":"Imitation and the circular reaction: is development driven by the child's imitative appropriation of others' acts?","topic":"Imitation and the circular reaction","question":"Is development driven by the child's imitative appropriation of others' acts?","position":"How does the child come to do what it could not do before — to speak, to draw, to handle the world as its elders do? Not by invention out of nothing, and not by mere instinct, but by imitation, which I hold to be no trivial aping but the very engine of mental growth. The infant begins with the circular reaction: a movement that happens to reproduce its own stimulus — the hand that strikes and is seen and struck again — and so is repeated, fixed, and refined, the organism holding on to the interesting result. Upon this the child builds by imitating first its own acts and then the acts of others, taking the model of another's performance and reproducing it, and in the effort producing something new in itself. Imitation is thus the bridge by which the social world enters the child and by which the child's own powers are built up; it is the method of development, the way the not-yet-able becomes the able. To dismiss imitation as mechanical copying is to miss that in the child it is the creative act by which mind grows.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"How does the child come to do what it could not do before — to speak, to draw, to handle the world as its elders do?","n":[]},{"t":"Not by invention out of nothing, and not by mere instinct, but by imitation, which I hold to be no trivial aping but the very engine of mental growth.","n":[]},{"t":"The infant begins with the circular reaction: a movement that happens to reproduce its own stimulus — the hand that strikes and is seen and struck again — and so is repeated, fixed, and refined, the organism holding on to the interesting result.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Upon this the child builds by imitating first its own acts and then the acts of others, taking the model of another's performance and reproducing it, and in the effort producing something new in itself.","n":[1]},{"t":"Imitation is thus the bridge by which the social world enters the child and by which the child's own powers are built up; it is the method of development, the way the not-yet-able becomes the able.","n":[]},{"t":"To dismiss imitation as mechanical copying is to miss that in the child it is the creative act by which mind grows.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895); The Story of the Mind (1898); Handbook of Psychology (1890-91). Reception: Piaget's adoption of the circular reaction as the engine of sensori-motor development; the modern imitation and social-learning literature (Meltzoff on neonatal imitation, mirror-neuron research); the behaviorist skepticism about imitation as a primitive.","works":["Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895)","The Story of the Mind (1898)","Handbook of Psychology (1890-91)"],"reception":"Piaget's adoption of the circular reaction as the engine of sensori-motor development; the modern imitation and social-learning literature (Meltzoff on neonatal imitation, mirror-neuron research); the behaviorist skepticism about imitation as a primitive.","status":"The circular reaction is one of Baldwin's most durable contributions: Piaget made it the central mechanism of sensori- motor development, and it remains a standard concept. Baldwin's elevation of imitation to the engine of development anticipated a major modern theme — the human capacity for imitation as foundational to learning and culture — vindicated by findings of neonatal imitation (Meltzoff), the mirror-neuron literature, and social-learning theory, after a long behaviorist interlude that treated imitation with suspicion. The specific architecture is dated, but the insight that imitation and self-reproducing action build the mind is broadly confirmed.","era":"1861-1934","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Now to acquire a movement seen, or in some other way externally set up, — this is exactly conscious imitation. The problem then reduces itself to the process of persistent effortful imitation; and we have to ask how attention to a movement seen, for example, enables the child or man to come to perform this movement himself.","label":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race"},{"n":2,"work":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Imitation the habit which it tends to stimulate is true to the situa- tion outside him which the child observes; that is, in so far as he succeeds in learning. For example, say a child sees me finger a ring. He has certain habits of action.","label":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development"},{"n":3,"work":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Now the reader asks at once: Does the child learn anything by such imitations? Is he not simply acting out his habits just the same whether it be the thought of his own fingers directly, or only the thought of them in- directly as suggested by the sight of some one else's fingers, which brings out the movement? To this last question we may answer, yes, at once.","label":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development"},{"n":4,"work":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But I have already criticised that view. 252 Organic Imitation Without taking up these questions again, I wish, while citing incidentally cases of the occurrence of imitation, to show the importance of repetitions and of the imitative way of securing repetitions, in the progress of mind, and thus to supply further support to what we may call the ' psycho- physical theory of development' outlined in the earlier…","label":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"organic-selection-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Organic selection (the Baldwin effect): can learning guide evolution without the inheritance of acquired characters?"},{"slug":"the-social-self","label":"The social self: is there any private ego prior to society, or are self and other born together?"},{"slug":"the-child-and-the-race","label":"The child and the race: does the mental development of the individual parallel the mental evolution of humanity?"}]}