Abstract
The acquisition of cultural beliefs and practices is fundamental to human societies. The psychological and neural mechanisms underlying cultural acquisition, however, are not well understood. Here we used brain imaging to investigate how others’ physical and sociocultural attributes may influence imitative learning, a critical component of cultural acquisition. While undergoing fMRI, 17 European American young adults imitated models from three different racial groups performing novel hand gestures. Participants learned that half the models shared their political ideology and half did not. We found that the model’s political ideology—a sociocultural characteristic devoid of any physical correlates—was sufficient to influence imitative accuracy, and that this effect was mediated by changes in feelings of similarity to the model. Furthermore, the relationship between the imitative model’s political ideology and imitation accuracy was mediated by brain regions associated with imitation and its control, as well as mentalizing. Finally, comparing these new data with those from one of our previous studies revealed that knowledge of a model’s political ideology reduces the influence of the model’s race on feelings of similarity to the model and imitation accuracy, as well as activity in brain regions typically activated during imitation. Taken together, these findings suggest that (1) others’ sociocultural characteristics influence imitative biases more so than their physical attributes, and (2) that neural systems associated with imitation, imitation control, and mentalizing contribute to this cultural learning process.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Kathleen Quach, Drew Morton, Kambria Nguyen and Zarrar Shehzad for their contributions to stimulus creation, data collection, and analysis. For generous support the authors also wish to thank National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellowship and NIH T90 DA02276, which supported the first author while conducting the research. The project described was supported by a research grant from the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture Brain and Development, and grants made to the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center including Grant Numbers RR12169, RR13642 and RR00865 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, Brain Mapping Support Foundation, Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, The Ahmanson Foundation, William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, Tamkin Foundation, Jennifer Jones-Simon Foundation, Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, Robson Family and Northstar Fund.
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Losin, E.A.R., Woo, CW., Krishnan, A. et al. Brain and psychological mediators of imitation: sociocultural versus physical traits. Cult. Brain 3, 93–111 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-015-0029-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-015-0029-9