Early imitation and the emergence of a sense of agency

In this paper, I would like to emphasize the developmental role of imitation as a foundation for the emergence of a sense of agency (i.e. a sense of being the owner of one’s own action). There is a large body of psychological and neuroimaging experiments that have demonstrated that perception of action share some common neural and cognitive mechanisms with action generation, action simulation, action recognition and action imitation. How the concept of shared motor representations relate to neonatal imitation is of major interest. Indeed, primary wired perceptualmotor coupling may be viewed as primitives of imitation which could play a main constitutive role in the establishment of a distinction between action originating from self and action originating from others. We will show that 2-month-olds do not imitate a selfpropelled robotic mouth protruding its tongue, while they do imitate a human tongue protrusion. This suggests that imitation is already selective of human action. Young infants select biological movements among all moving stimuli that are similar in speed, colour and morphology. Similarly, be imitated may be viewed as an actionperception coupling which may strongly contribute to distinguish between self-agency and other’s agency. In her first developmental steps, the very young infant may take the behaviour seen as being hers, which could result in reciprocal imitation if the movement seen does not match exactly the movement done. Through imitation, this will lead the infant to distinguish between two classes of perception that Russell proposes to be at the origin of the sense of agency: those perceptions that are a byproduct of one’s own action and intention, and perceptions coming from the external world, that you cannot modify at will. Comparing 2-month-olds’ behavior with a device allowing to present with a seamless shift contingent image and voice of the mother or delayed image and/or voice of the mother, we found 10 times more imitation in the contingent episode, where infant and mother can reciprocate imitation rounds. In addition, a high positive correlation between number of mother’s imitation and number of infant’s imitation was found. This suggests that imFigure 1: The teleprompter device used to delay im-