Causes and consequences of imitation Cecilia Heyes
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چکیده
Cecilia Heyes Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London, UK WC1E 6BT. e-mail: [email protected] Imitation is a focus of research in many disciplines: comparative, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary and social psychology; cognitive neuroscience; ethology; primatology; and robotics. As a result of its multidisciplinary origins, the literature on imitation is rich but scattered. The present article attempts to provide an integrative overview. The first section (‘Components’) summarizes, separately for each of the principal contributing disciplines, major empirical findings of the last few years. The second part outlines recent theoretical accounts of the psychological mechanisms of imitation (‘Causes’), and of the relationship between imitation and theory of mind (‘Consequences’), and evaluates these in relation to the evidence reviewed in the first section. Definitions of imitation are discussed in Box 1.
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