Play games and sing fingerplays with your baby that involve gestures and motions they can imitate. For example, “Where is your nose?” or “Where is your head?”
Neuroscience findings show that when babies see others produce actions with a particular body part, their brains are activated correspondingly. Researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University studied seventy 14-month-old infants. Findings showed that babies’ brains displayed specific activation patterns when an adult performed a task with different parts of her body. When 14-month-old babies watched an adult use her hand to touch a toy, the hand area of their brains lit up. When another group of infants watched an adult touch the toy using only her foot, the foot area of their brains showed more activity. This mapping facilitates imitation and could play a role in babies' ability to produce the same actions themselves.
Imitation games, such as "Peek-a-boo", provide early experience in mapping the similarities between self and others. Saby, J.N., Meltzoff, A.N., Marshall, P.J. (2013) Infants’ Somatotopic Neural Responses to Seeing Human Actions: I’ve Got You under My Skin. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77905. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077905 Meltzoff A. N. (2007). The 'like me' framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. Acta Psychologica, 124(1), 26–43.
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