  Another study by Gergely and his colleagues (2002) followed up on a finding of Meltzoff (1988) showing that 14-month-olds imitate the means an agent employs to attain a goal, even if those means are not the most direct or efficient. Meltzoff showed infants that tapping a panel light with his head made it light up. When babies returned to the lab the following week, they too used their heads to turn on the light, rather than simply pressing it with their hands. Gergely suggested that this seeming violation of rationality was not in fact irrational. He suggested that the baby might reason that if the light could be turned on with one’s hand, the adult they were imitating would have used his hand. The fact that the adult used his head to turn on the light suggests to the child that this must be a necessary means to achieve the goal. To test this hypothesis, the researchers added a condition in which the adult actor could not use his hands because they were otherwise engaged: the actor pretended to be very cold and used his hands to hold a blanket wrapped around him. With hands thus busy, the adult actor used his head to tap the panel light. They then compared the babies’ responses to the panel light in this hands-busy condition with the responses in the original Meltzoff condition where the actor’s hands were simply resting on the table. In the original Meltzoff condition, babies used their heads to turn on the light, but in the actor’s-hands-busy condition, the babies did not imitate the actor but instead used their hands. This supports the view that these babies already are acting on the basis of some principle connecting efficiency and goal-directedness, and that this principle is stronger than their tendency to imitate.