Abstract
Mirror neuron’s common coding of action perception and action production raises exciting possibilities for understanding imitation’s neural basis. Thus far, however, theorizing on this score has been hampered by oversimplification of imitation’s complex cognitive reality. This chapter provides a starting point for addressing this problem, synthesizing a broad range of behavioral research into a theoretically unified conception of human imitation. Particular attention is paid to the problem of reconciling selective imitation, in which children rationally omit unnecessary aspects of an adult’s behavior, with overimitation, in which they seem to do exactly the opposite. The apparent contradiction is resolved by refining the notion of selective imitation to its underlying computational basis, and showing that this computational substrate in fact predicts observed patterns of overimitation. Selective imitation and overimitation are thus re-conceptualized as different sides of the same coin—two rational social learning strategies whose superficial opposition conceals a deeper mechanistic and conceptual commonality.
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Notes
- 1.
Mirror neurons have not been directly observed in humans as they have in macaques. Evidence for the existence of similar neurons in humans, though increasingly compelling, is all derived from much more indirect measures such as fMRI. We will thus use the deliberately loose term ‘mirror system’ to refer to the mechanisms in the human brain that are inferred to correspond to macaque mirror neurons.
- 2.
Different authors define the distinction between imitation and emulation in different ways. Following Tomasello (1996) and Csibra (2007) among others, we define imitation as reproducing a model’s goal using the same means that the model employed; contrastingly, emulation is defined as reproducing a model’s goal using means of one’s own devising. See Call and Carpenter (2002) for a more detailed taxonomy of social learning mechanisms.
- 3.
This pattern of results was for chimps who participated in the opaque condition first, followed by the clear condition. When chimps were presented with the clear box first, they not only ignored the adult’s irrelevant actions on that box, but also generalized to the opaque box later on. That is, once chimps had seen that the first two of the experimenter’s actions were unnecessary on the clear box, they continued to ignore those actions even when they were performed on the opaque box.
- 4.
Nor did the order in which these conditions were presented alter children’s responses.
- 5.
For empirical studies bearing on the theoretical arguments outlined here, see Lyons et al., 2007.
- 6.
Of course, there is an important philosophical point to be raised at this juncture, namely that imitating down to the bottom level of any behavior hierarchy—down to the level of atomic motor primitives—is not practically possible. That is, as we progress down the hierarchy and subsidiary goals become progressively more fine-grained, discrepancies between the actor’s behavior and that of the model are eventually inevitable (Csibra, 2007). For the purposes of this chapter then, when we speak of ‘full’ imitation we will mean imitation down to the lowest level of the hierarchy at which veridical reconstruction of the model’s behavior is reasonably possible.
- 7.
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Frank Keil, Laurie Santos, and Deena Skolnick Weisberg for their helpful comments on this work. The author was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellowship.
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Lyons, D.E. (2008). The Rational Continuum of Human Imitation. In: Pineda, J.A. (eds) Mirror Neuron Systems. Contemporary Neuroscience. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-479-7_4
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