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The human infant as Homo imitans
... Meltzoff (1995) also advocated the idea that the imitative abilities of children develop in a linear fashion with regard to understanding the intentional acts of others, from copying simple body acts, to actions on objects and finally to using tools with objects. However, in contrast to Piaget (1962), Meltzoff and colleagues found evidence from a series of experiments on neonatal imitation that suggest infants younger than 6-months-old can imitate facial expressions such as tongue protrusions and head movements (Meltzoff & Moore 1977, 1983Meltzoff 1988d;Meltzoff 1995). ...
... Prior to these studies with newborn infants, Meltzoff & Moore (1977) had conducted similar studies with older infants, showing them various facial gestures from which they concluded imitation was shown. Ultimately, Meltzoff (1988d) concluded "this imitation far outstrips that predicted by standard theories" (p. 331). ...
... The majority of experiments in the literature have tested children in dyadic situations, and most often with the child or infant observing the adult experimenter (Meltzoff 1988d; Barr et al. 1996;Wohlschlager et al. 2003). Using an adult model in a dyadic scenario with children or infants, although it does not test for possible horizontal, peer-to-peer transmission, can represent day-to-day experiences of children who often imitate adults, such as their parents (Uzgiris 1991). ...
... Meltzoff and Moore have reported a number of studies in which newborn infants matched simple behaviors modeled by an adult experimenter, and the researchers have interpreted that matching as imitation [4] (but see [1,15,24,25] for different interpretations of the same data). Meltzoff has suggested that the ability to imitate is ''…part of a basic human biological endowment'' and that ''… [newborn] infants can at some level apprehend the isomorphism between body transformations they see and those they feel themselves make'' [26]. An Active Intermodal Mapping (AIM) mechanism is the proposed mechanism by which newborn infants are able to imitate the movements they observe [12,23]. ...
... The systems account is consistent with evidence that the most commonly reported instances of newborn infants' behavioral matching in imitation studies are probably not imitation, and thus that imitation is not innate [3,26,43,44]; evidence that toddlers younger than 30 months have little accessible knowledge about their own or others' bodies [44]; evidence that preschoolers' imitation relies heavily on cognitive processing [45][46][47] and especially, evidence that imitation emerges, not all at once as a unit, but at different ages, for the same behaviors in different children, and for different behaviors in the same children [25,[48][49][50]. ...
... The finding that children below 2 years of age rarely imitated the movements modeled in this study conflicts with existing reports of imitation of some specific behaviors at much younger ages [11,12,26,[53][54][55][56]. A detailed deconstruction of this research is beyond the scope of the present article, but Jones [3] has argued that many instances of infant and toddler behavior which have been interpreted as imitation are more likely to be something else (for discussion of a range of alternative interpretations of matching behaviors, see [57]). ...
Influential theories of imitation have proposed that humans inherit a neural mechanism - an "active intermodal matching " (AIM) mechanism or a mirror neuron system - that functions from birth to automatically match sensory input from others' actions to motor programs for performing those same actions, and thus produces imitation. To test these proposals, 160 1- to 2½-year-old toddlers were asked to imitate two simple movements- bending the arm to make an elbow, and moving the bent elbow laterally. Both behaviors were almost certain to be in each child's repertoire, and the lateral movement was goal-directed (used to hit a plastic cup). Thus, one or both behaviors should have been imitable by toddlers with a functioning AIM or mirror neuron system. Each child saw the two behaviors repeated 18 times, and was encouraged to imitate. Children were also asked to locate their own elbows. Almost no children below age 2 imitated either behavior. Instead, younger children gave clear evidence of a developmental progression, from reproducing only the outcome of the models' movements (hitting the object), through trying (but failing) to reproduce the model's arm posture and/or the arm-cup relations they had seen, to accurate imitation of arm bending by age 2 and of both movements by age 2½. Across age levels, almost all children who knew the word 'elbow' imitated both behaviors: very few who did not know the word imitated either behavior. The evidence is most consistent with a view of early imitation as the product of a complex system of language, cognitive, social, and motor competencies that develop in infancy. The findings do not rule out a role for an inherited neural mechanism, but they suggest that such a system would not by itself be sufficient to explain imitation at any age.
... Great apes, for instance, seem to be less prone to show imitation than other forms of social learning like emulation (Horner and Whiten 2005;Tennie et al. 2006;Clay and Tennie 2018). On the other hand, Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) (Bugnyar and Huber 1997;Huber 2000, 2007) and dogs (Canis familiaris) (Huber et al. , 2018(Huber et al. , 2020 show high-fidelity imitation despite not being closely related to humans (Homo imitans as proposed by Meltzoff 1988). This suggests that high-fidelity imitation may be driven by natural ecology and social structure rather than phylogenetic relatedness. ...
Social learning is an important aspect of dealing with the complexity of life. The transmission of information via the observation of other individuals is a cost-effective way of acquiring information. It is widespread within the animal kingdom but may differ strongly in the social learning mechanisms applied by the divergent species. Here we tested eighteen Kea (Nestor notabilis) parrots on their propensity to socially learn, and imitate, a demonstrated sequence of steps necessary to open an apparatus containing food. The demonstration by a conspecific led to more successful openings by observer birds, than control birds without a demonstration. However, all successful individuals showed great variation in their response topography and abandoned faithfully copying the task in favour of exploration. While the results provide little evidence for motor imitation they do provide further evidence for kea’s propensity towards exploration and rapidly shifting solving strategies, indicative of behavioural flexibility.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10336-023-02127-y.
... Moreover, cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to have evolved for learning and processing specifically social information in humans (e.g. Cosmides and Tooby 2015;Dean et al. 2014;Henrich 2016;Herrmann et al. 2007;McGuigan et al. 2007;Meltzoff 1988Meltzoff , 1999Tennie et al. 2016;Tomasello 1999;Whiten 2011). In contrast, although there may be some social influence on learning, non-human primates have been argued to be more restricted in what they can learn socially, depending more heavily on individual learning (e.g. ...
The limited evidence of complex culture in non-human primates contrasts strikingly with human behaviour. This may be because non-human primates fail to use information acquired socially as effectively as they use information acquired individually. Here, monkeys were trained on a stimulus discrimination task with a win-stay, lose-shift (WSLS) reward structure. In a social learning condition, the experimenter performed an information trial by choosing between the available stimuli; in an individual condition, monkeys made this choice themselves. The monkeys’ subsequent test trials displayed the same stimulus array. They were rewarded for repetition of rewarded (‘win-stay’) and avoidance of unrewarded (‘lose-shift’) information trial selections. Nine monkeys reached our pre-determined performance criterion on the initial two-stimulus stage. Their ability to generalise the WSLS strategy was then evaluated by transfer to a three-stimulus stage. Minimal differences were found in information use between the social and individual conditions on two-stimuli. However, a bias was found towards repetition of the information trial, regardless of information source condition or whether the information trial selection was rewarded. Proficient subjects were found to generalise the strategy to three-stimuli following rewarded information trials, but performed at chance on unrewarded. Again, this was not found to vary by source condition. Overall, results suggest no fundamental barrier to non-human primates’ use of information from a social source. However, the apparent struggle to learn from the absence of rewards hints at a difficulty with using information acquired from unsuccessful attempts; this could be linked to the limited evidence for cumulative culture in non-human primates.
... If this constraint was in place, children could not learn new social customs, behaviors, rituals, or practices from watching others, nor learn how to use novel tools to achieve instrumental ends. The imitation of novel acts is a Rosetta stone for investigating the nature and functional value of imitation in childhood (Meltzoff, 1988b;Meltzoff and Marshall, 2018). ...
... We are Homo imitans [92]. Humans can copy the topography of actionshow parts of the body move relative to one anothermore prolifically and with greater precision than any other species, and these imitative skills enable our use of technology and the formation of cooperative social groups. ...
The Baldwin effect is a hypothetical process in which a learned response to environmental change evolves a genetic basis. Modelling has shown that the Baldwin effect offers a plausible and elegant explanation for the emergence of complex behavioural traits, but there is little direct empirical evidence for its occurrence. We highlight experimental evidence of the Baldwin effect and argue that it acts preferentially on peripheral rather than on central cognitive processes. Careful scrutiny of research on taste-aversion and fear learning, language, and imitation indicates that their efficiency depends on adaptively specialised input and output processes: analogues of scanner and printer interfaces that feed information to core inference processes and structure their behavioural expression.
... We are "Homo imitans" (Meltzoff, 1988), better able than any other species to copy the topography of body movements-the way in which parts of the body move relative to one another. We use our prodigious capacity for imitation to acquire the facial expressions, bodily gestures, and ritualistic movements (e.g., dance and sports) that promote cooperation with members of our own social group and act as shibboleths, setting us apart from other groups. ...
The adaptive features of cognitive mechanisms, the features that make them fit for purpose, have traditionally been explained by nature and nurture. In the last decade, evidence has emerged that distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are also, and predominantly, shaped by culture. Like physical technology, human cognitive mechanisms are inherited via social interaction and made fit for purpose by culture evolution. This article surveys evidence from developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and cognitive neuroscience indicating that imitation, mentalizing, and language are “cognitive gadgets” shaped predominantly by cultural evolution. This evidence does not imply that the minds of newborn babies are blank slates. Rather, it implies that genetic evolution has made subtle changes to the human mind, allowing us to construct cognitive gadgets in the course of childhood through cultural learning.
... Evidence to suggest that language is not a prerequisite for imitation might be provided if a capacity for imitation could be shown to have developed in advance of linguistic competence. Several experiments (e.g., Meltzoff, 1988a) have found that infants as young as 9 months of age can reproduce object manipulations demonstrated by adults (see Meltzoff, 1988bMeltzoff, , 1996. However, such studies have tended not to provide conclusive evidence of imitation because they are subject to at least two types of alternative explanations. ...
This thesis is concerned with methodological problems which may arise when attempting to establish evidence of imitation with a directional control test, such as the bidirectional control procedure (e.g., Heyes and Dawson, 1990). Evidence presented here suggests that an outstanding interpretative issue (the emulation hypothesis) remains for all directional control tests, and the bidirectional control procedure has further interpretative and practical problems of its own (the odour hypothesis and a lack of sensitivity). According to the emulation hypothesis, observers subjected to a directional control test reproduce observed behaviours because they are influenced by visual exposure to the movements of the manipulandum, rather than the body movements of their demonstrators. Differences in humans' capacity to reproduce, while performing a concurrent task, object manipulations in a directional control test (which might be imitated or emulated), and body movements not directed towards an object (which could only be imitated) were interpreted as suggesting that emulation may occur in a directional control test. According to the odour hypothesis, observer rats subjected to the bidirectional control procedure tend to push a joystick in the same direction as their demonstrators because they are influenced by odorous physical traces asymmetrically deposited during demonstration sessions. Some evidence was found which is consistent with this hypothesis when the location of putative demonstration session deposits was independently manipulated in the bidirectional control procedure. A meta-analysis of a large sample of bidirectional control experiments revealed that the effect size for demonstrator-consistent responding in rats was modest. This was interpreted as suggesting that Heyes and Dawson's bidirectional control procedure is not sufficiently sensitive to be of practical use in the investigation of imitation. A more sensitive test was not found either by modifying this procedure, or by applying a modified procedure to capuchin monkeys.
... If this constraint was in place, children could not learn new social customs, behaviors, rituals, or practices from watching others, nor learn how to use novel tools to achieve instrumental ends. The imitation of novel acts is a Rosetta stone for investigating the nature and functional value of imitation in childhood (Meltzoff, 1988b;Meltzoff and Marshall, 2018). ...
Both prior experience and pedagogical cues modulate Western children’s imitation. However, these factors have not been systematically explored together within a single study. This paper explored how these factors individually and together influence imitation using 4-year-old children born and reared in mainland China (N = 210)—a country that contains almost one-fifth of the world’s population, and in which childhood imitation is under-studied using experimental methodology. The behavior of children in this culture is of special interest to theory because traditional East Asian culture places high value on conformity and fitting in with the group. Thus, high-fidelity imitation is emphasized in the local culture. This value, practice, or norm may be recognized by children at a young age and influence their imitative performance. In this study, we crossed prior self-experience and pedagogical cues, yielding four demonstration groups in addition to a control group. This design allowed us to investigate the degree to which Chinese preschoolers’ imitation was modulated by the two experimental factors. High-fidelity imitation was significantly modulated by prior self-experience but not by pedagogical cues, as measured by the number of novel acts imitated and also the serial order of these acts. This study (i) expands our understanding of factors that modulate imitation of novel behaviors in preschoolers and (ii) contributes to efforts to broaden research beyond Western societies to enrich our theories, particularly regarding social learning and imitation. Imitation is a key mechanism in the acquisition of culturally appropriate behaviors, mannerisms, and norms but who, what, and when children imitate is malleable. This study points to both cross-cultural invariants and variations to provide a fuller picture of the scope and functions of childhood imitation.
... Humans are extremely adept at copying others' behaviour (e.g. dubbed "Homo imitans" by Meltzoff, 1988) and seem to have a particular talent (or even a compulsion in some situations, Heyes, 2011) to do so. Conversely, non-human animals (henceforth animals) do not seem to exhibit the same proclivities to anything like the same degree. ...
A variety of different proposals have attempted to explain the apparent uniqueness of human cumulative culture as a consequence of underlying mechanisms that are also assumed to be uniquely well-developed in humans. Recently, Heyes and colleagues have proposed explicit (or Type 2) metacognition as a key feature of human cognition that might enable cumulative culture. In the current review we examine these arguments, and consider their plausibility. Firstly we consider whether distinctions between cognitive processes described as explicit/implicit, and Type 1/2 (or Systems 1/2), do indeed capture features that distinguish processes specific to human cognition, versus those that are shared with other species. In particular we consider whether this applies to distinctions relating to metacognitive processes. We also consider the ways in which explicit metacognitive processing might plausibly facilitate cumulative culture. We categorise the potential benefits as either optimising receiver behaviour, or optimising sender behaviour. Within both of these categories benefits could arise as a consequence of more effective representation of either one’s own knowledge state, or that of others. We evaluate the current state of evidence supporting each of these potential benefits. We conclude by proposing methodological approaches that could be used to directly test the theory, and also identify which (if any) of the possible causal mechanisms may be implicated.
... Consequently, there is neither a ''consensus" definition of imitation nor a consensus ''method" or tool to measure it. In the developmental sciences, we have learned much about what children imitate and remember as well as when in development such skills emerge (Barr & Hayne, 2000;Barr, Dowden, & Hayne, 1996;Meltzoff, 1988;Over & Carpenter, 2012;Vanvuchelen, Roeyers, & De Weerdt, 2011a, 2011bYoung et al., 2011). But it is an under-appreciated fact among developmental scientists that we know relatively little about how children imitate. ...
... Furthermore, imitation's role in human social learning likely underlies cultural transmission of specific behavior patterns ( Whiten, McGuigan, Marshall-Pescini, & Hopper, 2009) including language (Corballis, 2010;Iacoboni, 2009;Iacoboni & Wilson, 2006;Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004;Nadel, 2002). These collective findings have led some to assert that imitation is what distinguishes humans from other species (Meltzoff, 1988). ...
Human imitation is supported by an underlying ‘mirror system’ principally composed of inferior frontal (IF), inferior parietal (IP), and superior temporal (ST) cortical regions. Across primate species, differences in fronto-parieto-temporal connectivity have been hypothesized to explain phylogenetic variation in imitative abilities. However, if and to what extent these regions are involved in imitation in non-human primates is unknown. We hypothesized that ‘Do As I Do’ (DAID) imitation training would enhance white matter integrity within and between fronto-parieto-temporal regions. To this end, four captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were trained to reproduce 23 demonstrated actions, while four age/sex-matched controls were trained to produce basic husbandry behaviors in response to manual cues. Diffusion tensor images were acquired before and after 600 minutes of training over an average of 112 days. Bilateral and asymmetrical changes in fronto-parieto-temporal white matter integrity were compared between DAID trained subjects and controls. We found that imitation trained subjects exhibited leftward shifts in both mean fractional anisotropy and tract strength asymmetry measures in brain regions within the mirror system. This is the first report of training-induced changes in white matter integrity in chimpanzees and suggests that fronto-parieto-temporal connectivity, particularly in the left hemisphere, may have facilitated the emergence of increasingly complex imitation learning abilities.
... motor imitation are rare in the animal kingdom. Other species are specialized to duplicate a narrow band of behaviors, for example bird song. However, human infants exhibit a general imitative facility including vocal maneuvers, body movements, and object-oriented acts. To honor this species-typical trait I once referred to infants as Homo imitans (Meltzoff. 1988a). ...
Motor imitation constitutes one of the most complex cases of perceptual-motor coordination in early infancy. In motor imitation the target is a human act: infants must guide their own bodies to match the movements they see. Meltzoff and Moore have hypothesized that infants can, at some level, apprehend the equivalence between acts seen and acts done and that this active intermodal matching (AIM) underlies their imitation. Infants ability to coordinate multimodal information is also manifest in vocal imitation and in experiments showing that they can visually recognize articulatory movements that correspond to speech sounds they hear. Infants can also control their actions on the basis of long-term memories of perceptually absent events, as demonstrated by findings of deferred imitation of novel acts in 9–16-month-olds. Infants were shown an act and then a lengthy delay was inserted, after which deferred imitative performance was measured. Finally, studies were conducted to investigate relations between motor coordination and the growth of interpersonal understanding. We tested whether infants were sensitive to having their own movements imitated by adults. The results show that infants smiled and looked more at an adult who was mirroring their actions as compared to one who was not. There are two broad theoretical implications of this work. First, young infants may use imitation and visual-motor mapping to help make a basic cut in their world between people and things. Entities that themselves move in ways that look like the mvements that infants proprioceptively feel themselves make may be accorded special status. Thus infants may identify people and distinguish them from things by their pattern of movements. Second, an argument is proposed for how motor imitation plays a role in the development of empathy and other aspects of the child's developing theory of mind. The principal thesis of the chapter is that there is a psychological bridge between infants and adults right from btrth and that the bridge is constituted by shared action.
... To account for a child's ability to copy the body position of an adult without being able to see that change in its own body position (e.g., placing its hand on top of its head), Piaget proposed, not unreasonably, that the child must be able to take the perspective of a third party and reason, " What do I have to do, such that a third party would say that my body position matches that of the adult? " Th e problem with this hypothesis is that imitation of this kind can be found in children much younger than the age at which perspective taking is supposed to occur (Meltzoff , 1988 ). Even more convincing that imitation does not depend on perspective taking is the fi nding that several bird species, including pigeons (Zentall, Sutton, & Sherburne, 1996 ) and Japanese quail (Akins & Zentall, 1996, 1998), show imitative behavior of this kind. ...
When humans expend great energy to achieve a goal they generally appreciate the results more than if hard work is not necessary. This phenomenon, known as justification of effort, is a form of cognitive dissonance reduction (an attempt to alleviate the discomfort resulting from conflict between beliefs and behavior). But the fact that pigeons too show a preference for a stimulus (associated with food) that follows greater effort over a different stimulus (also associated with food) that follows less effort suggests that a simpler behavioral mechanism is involved. We have proposed a simpler mechanism based on contrast between the end of the effort and the reinforcement (or the signal for reinforcement) that follows. This model predicts that any relatively aversive event can be used to enhance the value of the reinforcer that follows it. In support of this general model, we have found this effect in pigeons when the prior event consists of more rather than less effort (pecking), a long rather than a short delay, and the absence of food rather than food. We have also found that a pigeon's preference for food at one location can shift towards a different location if acquiring food at the new location requires that the pigeon work harder to obtain food there. Contrast may also play a role in other social psychological phenomena that have been interpreted as cognitive dissonance effects.
... The understanding of another's looking behaviour could benefit from intrasubjective experiences -in this case, experience of oneself as a perceiver. Infants in the first year of life can imitate head movements and eye blinking (Meltzoff 1988;Meltzoff & Moore 1989;Piaget 1962). As unlikely as it seems at first, these data indicate that infants can map between the head movements and eyelid closures they see others perform and their own head movements and their own eye closures. ...
... AIM suggests that, when it comes to imitation, there is a fundamental discontinuity between humans and other animals. We are 'Homo imitans' [11]. Humans are more skilled and more prolific imitators than any other animals because only humans have an inborn, genetically inherited 'module' for imitation: an intermodal matching mechanism that can map representations of the self on to representations of others. ...
Many comparative and developmental psychologists believe thatwe are Homo imitans; humans are more skilled and prolific imitators than other animals, becausewe have a special, inborn ‘intermodal matching’ mechanism that integrates representations of others with representations of the self. In contrast, the associative sequence learning (ASL) model suggests that human infants learn to imitate using mechanisms that they share with other animals, and the rich resources provided by their sociocultural environments. This article answers seven objections to the ASL model: (i) it presents evidence that newborns do not imitate; (ii) argues that infants receive a plentiful supply of the kind of experience necessary for learning to imitate; (iii) suggests that neither infants nor adults can imitate elementally novel actions; (iv) explains why non-human animals have a limited capacity for imitation; (v) discusses the goaldirectedness of imitation; (vi) presents evidence that improvement in imitation depends on visual feedback; and (vii) reflects on the view that associative theories steal ‘the soul of imitation’. The empirical success of the ASL model indicates that the mechanisms which make imitation possible, by aligning representations of self with representations of others, have been tweaked by cultural evolution, not built from scratch by genetic evolution. © 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
... Humans have a high predisposition to learn from demonstration. Some researchers have proposed to denominate our species to be homo imitans, which means " man who imitates " [1]. Besides, some researchers defend that LfD is the best way to obtain complex behaviors [2]. ...
Humans are known to manage postural movements in a very elegant manner. In the task of standing up from a chair, a humanoid robot can benefit from the variability of human demonstrations. In this paper we propose a novel method for humanoid robots to imitate a dynamic postural movement demonstrated by humans. Since the kinematics of human participants and the humanoid robot used in this experiment are different, we solve the correspondence problem by making comparisons in a common reward space defined by a multimodal reward function composed of balance and effort terms. We fitted a fully actuated triple inverted pendulum to model both human and robot. We used Differential Evolution to find the optimal articular trajectory that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler difference between the human's and robot's reward profile subject to constraints.
... Meltzoff and his colleagues claim that the basic ability to imitate facial expressions, such as mouth opening, is present already at birth, establishing an altogether different timetable for the development of infant imitative development than suggested by Piaget (Meltzoff & Moore, 1999). Humans seem to be so predisposed to imitating that the term Homo imitans applies (Meltzoff 1988d (Ferrari et al. 2006). At the age of three days, these infants were able to imitate lip smacking, tongue protrusion, and mouth opening, after seeing a model. ...
... Learning from the observation of others was long thought to be a distinctive characteristic of humans; it was even suggested that a more appropriate name for the human species would be Homo imitans, man who imitates (Meltzoff 1988). Imitation is considered to be the pinnacle of social learning and the basis of cultural transmission (Heyes et al. 2009). ...
The ability to learn through imitation is thought to be the basis of cultural transmission and was long considered a distinctive characteristic of humans. There is now evidence that both mammals and birds are capable of imitation. However, nothing is known about these abilities in the third amniotic class-reptiles. Here, we use a bidirectional control procedure to show that a reptile species, the bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps), is capable of social learning that cannot be explained by simple mechanisms such as local enhancement or goal emulation. Subjects in the experimental group opened a trap door to the side that had been demonstrated, while subjects in the ghost control group, who observed the door move without the intervention of a conspecific, were unsuccessful. This, together with differences in behaviour between experimental and control groups, provides compelling evidence that reptiles possess cognitive abilities that are comparable to those observed in mammals and birds and suggests that learning by imitation is likely to be based on ancient mechanisms.
... The Cognitive Animal --Whiten, page 5 assumed to be strongly imitative ('Homo imitans'; Meltzoff 1988). We found that the children conformed to this expectation, and typically performed high-fidelity copies of the particular actions they had seen used. ...
Preparing to leave school for university, I recall expressing an interest in studying the mind; psychology perhaps, or even philosophy. This was an idea that clearly troubled my teachers. I think it was my biology teacher who announced that all psychologists were themselves pretty loony, so I would do much better to get a solid scientific foundation in a biological subject like zoology, then decide what to do next. And that is what I did, with the perhaps inevitable final intellectual destination of the sciences of the mind. Although I think my biology teacher was wrong about psychologists (well, mostly!), following his advice had the wonderful benefit that by the time I came to study the mind I was fully steeped in the principles of evolutionary biology. Of the many likely consequences of this I should highlight two here. One is the working hypothesis guiding my research, that the mind will only be understood as a biological adaptation, shaped by evolutionary processes to deal with a certain set of ecological challenges and opportunities. Second, intimately linked to this hypothesis, is the methodological principle that a research programme will only yield important insights if it is grounded in the animal's behavior in its natural habitat. This perspective was importantly shaped by Lorenz, Tinbergen and von Frisch, whose groundbreaking work led them to the 1973 Nobel Prize. Always building on a foundation of good natural history, they used a great variety of complementary methods, including systematic and quantitative observation, and experimentation in both field and laboratory. This combination was enormously productive and, given the way it was grounded in nature, achieved insights that no other approach could.
... And it has not gone unnoticed. The ability of humans to imitate others was stressed as early as Aristotle: "Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation."(cited in Meltzoff (1988)) Social learning theory Although learning from observing the behaviour of others had been documented by many authors (consider Aristotle, or Gabriel Tarde's "laws of imitation"), a comprehensive theory of social learning was first proposed by Albert Bandura (1977), a professor of psychology at Stanford university. Earlier theories of human behaviour focused on the process of learning that takes place within the individual. ...
... In addition, the child imitation is frequently deferred, as has been reported in babies as young as 14 months of age (e.g. Meltzoff, 1988) and can be extended to new situations. Therefore, mothers would produce symbolic and social gestures at a given point in time without any immediate response on the part of the child and vice versa and yet the learning process would be successful in the long run. ...
This study looks at whether there is a relationship between mother and infant gesture production. Specifically, it addresses the extent of articulation in the maternal gesture repertoire and how closely it supports the infant production of gestures. Eight Spanish mothers and their 1-and 2-year-old babies were studied during 1 year of observations. Maternal and child verbal production, gestures and actions were recorded at their homes on five occasions while performing daily routines. Results indicated that mother and child deictic gestures (pointing and instrumental) and representational gestures (symbolic and social) were very similar at each age group and did not decline across groups. Overall, deictic gestures were more frequent than representational gestures. Maternal adaptation to developmental changes is specific for gesturing but not for acting. Maternal and child speech were related positively to mother and child pointing and representational gestures, and negatively to mother and child instrumental gestures. Mother and child instrumental gestures were positively related to action production, after maternal and child speech was partialled out. Thus, language plays an important role for dyadic communicative activities (gesture–gesture relations) but not for dyadic motor activities (gesture–action relations). Finally, a comparison of the growth curves across sessions showed a closer correspondence for mother–child deictic gestures than for representational gestures. Overall, the results point to the existence of an articulated maternal gesture input that closely supports the child gesture production.
... The one thing all comparative psychologists seem to agree on, however, is that, whatever imitation is, humans do it best. From a very young age, humans routinely copy a wide variety of vocal and motor behaviors with extreme flexibility, including old and new behaviors, both immediately and delayed, with the ability to transfer across situational contexts (see Meltzoff, 1988Meltzoff, , 1996. Indeed, imitation is so fundamental to the human psyche that it is thought to provide the evolutionary and ontogenetic roots for the development of human culture, language, and theory of mind (e.g., Meltzoff, 1996;Tomasello, 1999;Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). ...
This study investigated the ability of a bottlenose dolphin to adapt a previously learned "do-as-I-do" procedure to copy behaviors of another dolphin while blindfolded (i.e., wearing eyecups). In Experiment 1, the dolphin was able to copy both vocal and motor behaviors, whether blindfolded or sighted. Hydrophone recordings showed that he echolocated during many of the motor behaviors while blindfolded. In Experiment 2, blindfolded human trainers were able to identify the same model behaviors on the basis of their characteristic sounds. While it thus remains unclear whether the dolphin recognized the motor behaviors via echolocation or via their characteristic sounds, this is the first demonstration of such flexibility in using a new perceptual route to motor imitation in a nonhuman animal.
... The understanding of another's looking behaviour could benefit from intrasubjective experiences -in this case, experience of oneself as a perceiver. Infants in the first year of life can imitate head movements and eye blinking (Meltzoff 1988;Meltzoff & Moore 1989;Piaget 1962). As unlikely as it seems at first, these data indicate that infants can map between the head movements and eyelid closures they see others perform and their own head movements and their own eye closures. ...
The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore’s (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have implications for theories of social-cognitive development. Here we identify 11 flaws in Oostenbroek et al.’s experimental design that biased the results toward null effects. We requested and obtained the authors’ raw data. Contrary to the authors’ conclusions, new analyses reveal significant tongue-protrusion imitation at all four ages tested (1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks old). We explain how the authors missed this pattern and offer five recommendations for designing future experiments. Infant imitation raises fundamental issues about action representation, social learning, and brain–behavior relations. The debate about the origins and development of imitation reflects its importance to theories of developmental science.
DOI: 10.1111/desc.12609
The primary goal of this paper is to retrace the origins of the phonesthemic {gr-/prehension}, {sm-/oral phenomena} and {sn-/nasality} relations attested in English by words such as grab, grasp and grip, smile, smirk and smooch, and sneeze, sniff and snore respectively, to Proto-Indo-European and beyond. After a discussion of the links between phonesthemes, sound symbolism and arbitrariness, it investigates gr-, sm- and sn- within a psychomechanical approach. The three relations are contextualized by an exploration of their existence in Indo-European languages and, at featural level, in language families other than Indo-European. The second goal of the paper is embedded in the claim that the phonetic characteristics of the ‘core invariants’ in English gr-, sm- and sn- reconstructable for PIE (the tectal <*G(h)> in *G(h)r-, and the nasals <*m> and <*n> in *sm- and *sn- respectively) can be projected back, within the above relations, to the putative conditions of the origins of speech, by adopting a semiogenetic perspective. The framework adopted to do so is STEELS, a neo-Darwinian theory of the emergence and evolution of the linguistic sign which postulates that the initial use of resonances produced by the human vocal tract was both self-referential and vocomimetic.
When an animal matches the behavior of another animal of the same species it likely has evolutionary value because that behavior often avoids the negative outcomes that may accompany trial and error learning. Psychologists have been interested in the mechanisms that might be responsible for the copying behavior. Flocking behavior, an example of behavioral contagion, for example, is likely to be under genetic control. Alternatively, if an animal needs to acquire a new behavior to obtain a reinforcer, the mere presence of another animal may influence motivation, and perhaps also performance. Also, when observing the performance of a response, attention to the manipulated object may be sufficient to facilitate learning. Furthermore, a distinction can be made between imitating the movements of the demonstrator and learning the relations between the manipulated object and the reinforcer (learned affordance). Research using the two-action procedure controls for all of these alternative mechanisms and shows what appears to be evidence for a more cognitive form of imitation. Although human children show a remarkable propensity to imitate there is evidence that many other species (not only other apes, other mammals, and bird species) show evidence that they too will imitate the behavior of others, under appropriate conditions. These results suggest that imitation, thought to be a conceptually cognitive behavior, is widely distributed among many animal species.
Aside from those who have been inspired by Griffin’s writings on cognitive ethology (Griffin, 1984, 1992), most students of bird behavior are unaware that a major revolution has overtaken scientific thinking about the behavior of primates and other mammals. The cognitive revolution took psychology by storm some years ago and, for many primatologists and psychologists, supplemented, and even superseded, more traditional approaches to the study of behavior, especially behavior of a social nature. This revolution led students of primate social behavior to focus on new kinds of questions that rarely arise in more traditionally oriented studies of the social behavior of birds. Although research on avian cognition figured prominently in the activities of early ethologists (e.g. Koehler, 1943, 1956a, 1956b; Thorpe, 1963), it fell from fashion. Instead, in the hands of behavioral ecologists and students of social evolution, economically inspired cost–benefit studies and kin selection theorizing became the driving forces behind most investigations of the behavior of birds, both in the field and in the laboratory.
For highly social organisms such as primates (including humans), cetaceans (whales and dolphins), and others, social learning, the ability to learn from others, is a powerful mechanism complementing and supporting individual learning. Also, in many species social learning and imitation provide the basis for culture, where behavior, ideas, or beliefs etc. are spreading within a population and passed down from generation to generation. One type of social learning has attracted particular attention among biologists and psychologists: imitation. For many years discussions on imitation in animals have focused on trying to define imitation, in particular trying to identify how it differs from other types of social learning. Some researchers, e.g. (Blackmore 1999), view imitation as a crucial mechanism for transmitting memes (the units of cultural evolution, analogous to the role genes play in biological evolution, Dawkins 1976). To what extent imitation is special to the human species is highly controversial (Blackmore 1999, Reader and Laland 1999); see also Sect. 1.2 below.
How does nonhuman primate innovation compare to our own? Many primates innovate, for example to get otherwise inaccessible food or to increase their social standing, and nonhuman primate innovation can be broken into three component steps. It begins with the initial invention, which is then transmitted to other members of the inventor’s group, and is then adopted by other individuals and maintained within the society. These three steps – invention, transmission, and maintenance – are all required for innovation and in this review, I discuss the factors (social, environmental, and cognitive) that influence each step. I also highlight the comparable and contrasting features between human and nonhuman primate innovation. In contrast to human innovations, primate innovations are relatively simple and are typically self-serving. Nonhuman primates do not invent new products explicitly for the use of others (although group members certainly copy others' innovations) and nor are their inventions artistic or abstract in nature. Intriguingly, although chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates appear to be expert at copying others’ inventions, there is far less evidence of their ability to build upon others’ inventions (i.e., to show cumulative culture). At the core of our complex cultural world is the fidelity with which we copy others and our specialism at building upon the ideas of others. Thus, it is the cumulative nature of our innovative process that has created our complex material cultural world and is a key difference between how we innovate, learn and transmit knowledge, and how our chimpanzee cousins copy one another. Another difference is our ability to work collaboratively in teams to innovate and develop new technologies, as well as our potential to cooperate in an altruistic way that allows for planning for future generations. In conclusion, perhaps primate innovation can be most usefully likened to human ‘user innovators’ who typically innovate products or techniques to fill a personal need, rather than by being driven to create a product to go to market.
How does nonhuman primate innovation compare to our own? Many primates innovate, for example to get otherwise inaccessible food or to increase their social standing, and nonhuman primate innovation can be broken into three component steps. It begins with the initial invention, which is then transmitted to other members of the inventor’s group, and is then adopted by other individuals and maintained within the society. These three steps – invention, transmission, and maintenance – are all required for innovation and in this review, I discuss the factors (social, environmental, and cognitive) that influence each step. I also highlight the comparable and contrasting features between human and nonhuman primate innovation. In contrast to human innovations, primate innovations are relatively simple and are typically self-serving. Nonhuman primates do not invent new products explicitly for the use of others (although group members certainly copy others' innovations) and nor are their inventions artistic or abstract in nature. Intriguingly, although chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates appear to be expert at copying others’ inventions, there is far less evidence of their ability to build upon others’ inventions (i.e., to show cumulative culture). At the core of our complex cultural world is the fidelity with which we copy others and our specialism at building upon the ideas of others. Thus, it is the cumulative nature of our innovative process that has created our complex material cultural world and is a key difference between how we innovate, learn and transmit knowledge, and how our chimpanzee cousins copy one another. Another difference is our ability to work collaboratively in teams to innovate and develop new technologies, as well as our potential to cooperate in an altruistic way that allows for planning for future generations. In conclusion, perhaps primate innovation can be most usefully likened to human ‘user innovators’ who typically innovate products or techniques to fill a personal need, rather than by being driven to create a product to go to market.
Our rich and diverse cultural landscape has arisen not only from our ability to innovate but also because we can copy others and build upon the knowledge of previous generations. Although admittedly not to the same degree as us, chimpanzees and orang-utans in the wild also exhibit behavioural 'cultures'. They too show an ability to plan, learn from others, and retain information over time. But are they able to combine these in the same ways as us by replicating behaviours after minutes, hours and months have passed? Are apes capable of deferred imitation?
Comparative research, once at the center of American behaviorism, has recently broadened its base to focus more on cognitive processes and social learning. That shift has come about through influences from cognitive and developmental psychology as well as from behavioral ecology. Behavioral ecologists, who study ecological systems, are interested in the adaptive value of behavior to the animal; for this reason, they typically start by observing naturally occurring animal behavior. If nonhuman animals can be shown to have an ability (for example, imitation) that is thought to be mediated by a particularly advanced cognitive process (such as perspective taking), then one is more likely to consider the possibility that the underlying mechanism may be simpler. The present chapter takes this approach with regard to a well-studied phenomenon in human social psychology: cognitive dissonance. Contrast effects in pigeons may contribute to a number of experimental findings that have been reported with humans but which traditionally have been explained using more complex cognitive and social accounts.
Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering. Tecumseh Fitch cuts through this vast literature, bringing together its most important insights to explore one of the biggest unsolved puzzles of human history.
Richard Gross turns his expert eye to the psychology of human nature in a contemplative account encompassing cognition, consciousness, language, time perception, sense of mortality and human society. This book will help you to consider the unique aspects of being human and to understand the biological underpinnings for the intriguing and distinct behaviours and experiences common to human beings.
Social learning allows for the transmission of information between individuals and, potentially, across generations. In addition to increasing the efficiency by which new behaviors are learned it can also facilitate the propagation of behavioral traditions and, ultimately, culture. In the first half of this chapter we describe the social learning mechanisms that define how information is transmitted, under what circumstances social learning is advantageous, and provide an evolutionary perspective by illustrating different species' propensities for social learning. Through the second half of this chapter we compare the behavioral traditions observed among animals in the wild. We discuss the defining features of human culture and whether any animals, other than ourselves, can be considered "cultural." We conclude that although human material culture was long thought to be a defining hallmark of our species, current reports from both the wild and captivity have begun to dispel the notion that we are the only cultural beings.
This book invites readers to discover the simple heuristics that people use to navigate the complexities and surprises of environments populated with others. The social world is a terrain where humans and other animals compete with conspecifics for myriad resources, including food, mates, and status, and where rivals grant the decision maker little time for deep thought, protracted information search, or complex calculations. The social world also encompasses domains, however, where social animals such as humans learn from one another how to deal with the vagaries of a natural world that both inflicts unforeseeable hazards and presents useful opportunities and dare to trust and forge alliances with one another to boost their chances of success. According to the book's thesis, the undeniable complexity of the social world does not dictate cognitive complexity as many scholars of rationality argue. Rather, it entails circumstances that render optimization impossible or computationally arduous: intractability, the existence of incommensurable considerations, and competing goals. With optimization beyond reach, less can be more. That is, heuristics-simple strategies for making decisions when time is pressing and careful deliberation an unaffordable luxury-become indispensible mental tools. As accurate or even more accurate than complex methods when used in the appropriate environments, these heuristics are good descriptive models of how people make many decisions and inferences, but their impressive performance also poses a normative challenge for optimization models. In short, the homo socialis may prove to be a homo heuristicus whose intelligence reflects ecological rather than logical rationality. © 2013 by Ralph Hertwig and Ulrich Hoffrage. All rights reserved.
Writers from a variety of disciplines recognize that culture is composed of or depends on behavior, but is also somehow more than an unorganized collection of behavioral events. Biologist Bonner (1980) defined culture as “behavior transmitted from one individual to another by teaching and learning” (p. 17). Cultural anthropologist Harris (1964) stated, “human behavior constitutes the cultural field of inquiry” (p. 20). However, human responses “are definitely not cultural things,” (Harris, p. 22) but rather are the empirical events to which scientific operations must be applied to arrive at cultural classifications. Behavior analyst Baum (2000) stated, “culture consists of behavior andchrw(133) cultural change constitutes an evolutionary process” (p. 182).
Imitation and object naming are the first steps in language acquisition. While in typical development, imitation is easier than naming, there is a lack of agreement about the role of imitation in language impairment in general, and in Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS), in particular. Hence, the aim of this study is to compare imitation and naming in CAS and to analyze the nature of errors according to the complexity of the word and across the three levels of the prosodic hierarchy: the segmental level, the syllabic level and the prosodic word level. Sixteen children diagnosed with CAS (average age 3;11) participated in the study. The data, collected from each child in the course of eight weekly meetings, are drawn from naming and imitating single words. The results indicate that imitation seems to be an easier task than naming; both tasks are more difficult as the words get longer. Fewer errors are seen on the prosodic level, while most of the errors occur on the segmental and syllabic levels.
Evidence of observational learning (social learning) is present in many species. One such task is the one-trial taste-avoidance task, in which Actor chicks peck a bead coated with an aversant substance. Observer chicks learn to avoid beads that are similar in appearance to the one presented to the Actors. It has been firmly established that active learning of the one-trial taste-avoidance task is dependent on a constrained level of glutamate receptor activation. The current study examined the effects of memantine, a noncompetitive N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, on the learning by Observers. Memantine produced an inverted U-shaped dose-dependent response curve; 1.0 mmol/l memantine produced significant improvement. These results demonstrate that memantine influences memory formation for observational learning in the day-old chick and support the hypothesis that memantine can improve memories by altering levels of glutamate during memory formation.
In this paper, we present a novel methodology to obtain imitative and innovative postural
movements in a humanoid based on human demonstrations in a di®erent kinematic scale. We
collected motion data from a group of human participants standing up from a chair. Modeling
the human as an actuated 3-link kinematic chain, and by de¯ning a multi-objective reward
function of zero moment point and joint torques to represent the stability and e®ort, we
computed reward pro¯les for each demonstration. Since individual reward pro¯les show variability
across demonstrating trials, the underlying state transition probabilities were modeled
using a Markov chain. Based on the argument that the reward pro¯les of the robot should show
the same temporal structure of those of the human, we used di®erential evolution to compute a
trajectory that ¯ts all humanoid constraints and minimizes the di®erence between the robot
reward pro¯le and the predicted pro¯le if the robot imitates the human. Therefore, robotic
imitation involves developing a policy that results in a temporal reward structure, matching
that of a group of human demonstrators across an array of demonstrations. Skill innovation was
achieved by optimizing a signed reward error after imitation was achieved. Experimental results
using the humanoid HOAP-3 are shown.
Learning abilities are categorized into social (learning from others) and individual learning (learning on one's own). Despite the typically higher cost of individual learning, there are mechanisms that allow stable coexistence of both learning modes in a single population. In this paper, we investigate by means of mathematical modeling how the effect of spatial structure on evolutionary outcomes of pure social and individual learning strategies depends on the mechanisms for coexistence. We model a spatially structured population based on the infinite-island framework and consider three scenarios that differ in coexistence mechanisms. Using the inclusive-fitness method, we derive the equilibrium frequency of social learners and the genetic load of social learning (defined as average fecundity reduction caused by the presence of social learning) in terms of some summary statistics, such as relatedness, for each of the three scenarios and compare the results. This comparative analysis not only reconciles previous models that made contradictory predictions as to the effect of spatial structure on the equilibrium frequency of social learners but also derives a simple mathematical rule that determines the sign of the genetic load (i.e. whether or not social learning contributes to the mean fecundity of the population).
Our ability to think is one of our most puzzling characteristics. What would it be like to be unable to think? What would it be like to lack self-awareness? The complexity of this activity is striking. Thinking involves the interaction of a range of mental processes - attention, emotion, memory, planning, self-consciousness, free will, and language. So where did these processes arise? What evolutionary advantages were bestowed upon those with an ability to deceive, to plan, to empathize, or to understand the intentions of others? In this compelling work, the author embarks on an evolutionary detective story to try and solve one of the big mysteries surrounding human existence - how has the modern human being's way of thinking come into existence? He starts by taking in turn the more basic cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, then builds upon these to explore more complex behaviours, such as self-consciousness, mindreading, and imitation. Having done this, he examines the consequences of 'putting thought into the world', using external media like cave paintings, drawings and writing.
Human beings are imitative generalists. We can immediately imitate a wide range of behaviors with great facility, whether they be vocal maneuvers, body postures, or actions on objects. The ontogeny of this skill has been an enduring question in developmental psychology. Classical theory holds that the ability to imitate facial gestures is a milestone that is passed at about one year. Before this time infants are thought to lack the perceptual-cognitive sophistication necessary to match a gesture they can see with one they cannot see themselves perform. A second developmental milestone is the capacity for deferred imitation, i.e. imitation of an absent model. This is said to emerge at about 18 months, in close synchrony with other higher-order activities such as object permanence and tool use, as part of a general cognitive shift from a purely sensory-motor level of functioning to one that allows language. Research suggests that the imitative capacity of young infants has been underestimated. Human infants are capable of imitating facial gestures at birth, with infants less than one day old manifesting this skill. Moreover recent experiments have established deferred imitation well before the predicted age of 18 months. Studies discussed here show that 9-month-olds can duplicate acts after a delay of 24 hours, and that 14-month-olds can retain and duplicate as many as five actions over a 1-week delay. These new findings re-raise questions about the relation between nonverbal cognitive development and language development: What aspects, if any, of these two domains are linked? A hypothesis is delineated that predicts certain very specific relations between particular cognitive and semantic achievements during the one-word stage, and data are reported supporting this hypothesis. Specifically, relations are reported between: (a) the development of object permanence and the use of words encoding disappearance, (b) means-ends understanding (as manifest in tool use) and words encoding success and failure, and (c) categorization behavior and the onset of the naming explosion. This research on human ontogeny suggests close and highly specific links between aspects of early language and thought.
One might think that after a century of research, social learning would be well understood. Yet, one is still wrestling with the most fundamental issues that he or she can think of. This chapter describes experiments specifically concerned with such issues in a comparative fashion across different primate species. Until recently, these studies were generally seen as supporting the significance of imitation, and the cultural transmission it could produce in the primates. However, recent years have seen critiques that question the supposed important role of these phenomena and in some cases even challenge their existence. This chapter also proposes that evidence of imitation in apes has been restricted to those reared in ways like those experienced by children. Experiments with non-enculturated apes have produced negative results. This leads to doubt about whether wild apes, which lack such support, imitate. The present experiments cannot resolve such questions, which for the moment must remain open. The relatively unimpressive nature of the imitation shown in these studies when compared with that shown by the children or claimed elsewhere for apes might turn out to be due to lack of human enculturation, but it remains to be determined whether it may instead be the result of a lack of an ontogenetic history of natural chimpanzee enculturation.
[highlights] intradisciplinary diversity in the way in which imitation has been defined / the purpose of Zentall's . . . review of types of nonimitative social learning . . . is to show that "true imitation" can be defined by exclusion; using identified control procedures, one can demonstrate that a social learning phenomenon is not nonimitative, and therefore, by default, is imitation / the control procedure that Zentall favors in this context is the "2-action" method, in which observer animals witness demonstrators performing 1 of 2 different actions on the same object or manipulandum (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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