produced by a specialized system that is, even in adults, sep-
arated from conscious access.^13
Are there different people out there? Infants start to treat
human faces as a special kind of visual stimulus more or less
from the word go. It is not just that they note the difference
between faces and other objects in their environment. They
also pay more attention to differences between faces than to
differences between other visual stimuli. The reason for that
special behavior is that the child is quickly building up a data-
base of relevant people. From a few days after birth, the child
[110] starts to build up different "files" for each of the persons she
interacts with, by remembering not just their faces but also
how she interacted with them. Psychologist Andrew Meltzoff
discovered that infants use imitation to identify people. If the
infant has played at imitating a particular gesture with an
adult, she will try different ones with other adults. When the
previous playmate returns she will return to the previous rou-
tines again. In other words, the child seems to use imitation as
a way to check out who she is interacting with, which person-
file she should associate with a given face, smell, etc. What
the child assumes—or rather, what the child's brain is built to
assume—is that the differences between two humanlike
objects are far more important than those between, say, two
different mice or two different toys. Babies do not start by
seeing lots of stuff in the world and noticing that some of
them—people's faces—have common features. They start
with a predisposition to pay special attention to facelike dis-
plays and to the differences between them.^14
Incidentally, the fact that an infant can imitate adults'
facial gestures (sticking out the tongue, pursing the lips,
frowning, etc.) shows that the newborn's brain is equipped
with highly specialized capacities. To imitate, you need to
match visual information from the outside with motor con-
trol from inside. Infants start doing all this before they have
ever seen their own faces in mirrors and before parents react
to that behavior. The child does not learn to imitate but uses
imitation to learn. Imitation can be used to recognize differ-
ent people; but it is also crucial to the acquisition of complex
gestures, and to some extent to the acquisition of the sounds
of language.^15
RELIGION EXPLAINED