Imitation or Early Imitation: Towards the Problem of Primary Data Entry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33423/jhetp.v21i4.4222Keywords:
higher education, coherent intelligence, emotions, emotional contagion, imitation, interpersonal synchrony, newborns behavior, primary data entry, social cognition, socialization, theory of mindAbstract
The paper highlights the discrepancy between newborns' communication disability and their successful performance in social tasks. The author believes that the "blank mind" can only acquire social meanings by social interaction; it is the only possible way of knowledge acquisition that obeys Nature's laws. There is no other mechanism of transmitting information about social reality to the "blank mind", which can help newborns succeed in imitation. In specific, the article discusses: (1) the terms "early imitation" and "imitation", showing them as two different phenomena of mirror actions in, respectively, newborns and infants (at 8-12 month-olds); (2) the lack of evidence on matching in studies may show that experiments on "early imitation" did not consider emotional arousal as an independent variable of their research; (3) the problem of Primary Data Entry (PDE), how a "blank mind" acquires the first social meanings to initiate knowledge acquisition.
