The Imitation Factor

An acclaimed biologist draws on a wide range of his own and others' research into the behavior of fish, birds, whales, and humans to reveal the failure of genetic determination to explain mating behavior and the fundamental process of learning.

Imitation and Education provides an in-depth reassessment of learning by example that places imitation in a larger social context. It is the first book to bring together ancient educational thought and startling breakthroughs in the fields of cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy to reconsider how we learn from the lives of others. Bryan R. Warnick addresses how we become exemplars, analyzes how exemplars inspire imitation, and assesses the meaning and value of imitation in education and society, including how teachers can better use examples and what should be done about problems such as the imitation of media violence. Warnick constructs a provocative, cautionary, yet hopeful account of learning by example that acknowledges the power of social contexts in shaping human lives.

The Imitation of Gestures describes the sets of tests of the imitation of gestures in children performed by the examiner. These tests provide valuable information about the development of motor skills, particularly the right-left orientation in children from 4 to 8 years of age. This book is composed of two main sections encompassing 9 chapters. Part I presents the methods for studying the imitation of simple and complex gestures of the hands and arms. This part also covers the application of these methods to children who would be likely to have disturbances in motor and verbal development. The second part describes the supplementary tests to the Imitation of gestures test used for the study of body image. This part also deals with the intercorrelations between the results obtained on the different tests, namely, the Imitation of gestures, Drawn-a-man test, Grace Arthur mannequin puzzle, and the verbal test of naming and pointing to the body parts. Pediatricians, neurologists, and clinical psychologists will find this book rewarding.

This is Volume XV of a series of thirty-two on Developmental Psychology. Originally published in 1936, this study looks at when speech begins in children. The sounds that a child makes during his first few months are so elusive and apparently so remote from anything that might be called language that any observer however interested in speech might well be pardoned for waiting until the noises become, at any rate, a little more obviously human. To persist in making observations one must be interested in the variety of human sounds merely as sounds, one must have faith in the continuity of growth, and in addition, perhaps, one must have something of that insensitiveness to ridicule which is found at its highest in the truly devoted parent.

First published in 1999. This volume is the third of a series devoted to the first years of the child’s development, the two others being concerned with the beginnings of intelligence and the child’s construction of reality (La naissance de intelligence chez Venfant and La construction du réel chez Venfant). Although this book contains frequent references to the two other volumes, which deal with the same three children and study the relationships between their mental activities, it nevertheless constitutes in itself an independent and complete study

A weekly review of politics, literature, theology, and art.