Andrew N. Meltzoff (born February 9, 1950) is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development.
His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition, personality and brain development.
He is married to the internationally recognized speech and hearing scientist and language acquisition researcher Patricia K. Kuhl.
In 1977, Science published the ground-breaking paper "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" by Meltzoff, who was still at Oxford, and M. Keith Moore of the University of Washington.
[1] According to the abstract, Infants between 12 and 21 days of age can imitate both facial and manual gestures; this behavior cannot be explained in terms of either conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms.
The study also showed early facial imitation, something previously thought to be impossible at this young age because of its necessarily crossmodal nature.
[8] In collaboration with neuroscientist Jean Decety, Meltzoff has started to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning imitation[9][10][11] empathy[12][13] and gaze-following.
As a result, infants begin to acquire an understanding of other minds and their mental states (desires, visual perception and basic emotions, for instance).