To imitate or not to imitate? How the brain can do it, that is the question!

In this paper the authors discuss the most prominent views addressing the issue of how we imitate actions. It is argued that the existing theories lay along a continuum, with the direct mapping approach at one end (Butterworth, 1990; Gray, Neisser, Shapiro, & Kouns, 1991) the Active Intermodal Matching approach (Melzoff & Moore, 1997) in the middle, and the goal-directed theory (Bekkering, Wohlshäger, & Gattis, 2000) and the dual route theory (Rumiati & Tessari, 2002) at the opposite end. Interestingly the latter views can account for behaviors that cannot be explained by invoking the direct mapping or the Active Intermodal Matching approach.