This study evaluates the correlation between failure to develop spontaneous imitation and language skills in pervasive developmental disorders. Sixty-four children between the age of 3 and 8 years were assessed using the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R), the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS), and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), as well as direct observation of i...

Evidence from multiple sources reveals a surprising link between imitation and dance. As in the classical correspondence problem central to imitation research, dance requires mapping across sensory modalities and the integration of visual and auditory inputs with motor outputs. Recent research in comparative psychology supports this association, in that entrainment to a musical beat is almost e...

Nineteen people with Asperger syndrome (AS)/High-Functioning Autism (HFA) (ages 7-15) were tested on imitation of two types of meaningless gesture: hand postures and finger positions. The individuals with AS/HFA achieved lower scores in the imitation of both hand and finger positions relative to a matched neurotypical group. The between-group difference was primarily accounted for by performanc...

Research has shown that after observing a sequence of object-related actions, young children sometimes imitate the goal-directed aspects of the actions only, but other times faithfully imitate all aspects of the actions. In this study we explore whether this mixture of goal-directed and faithful imitation is based in part on individual differences between children. Forty-eight 2-year-old childr...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...

Three experiments investigated the size and sources of age-related changes in visual imitation. In Experiment 1, young and older adults viewed sequences of quasi-random movements and then reproduced from memory what they had seen. As expected, older adults made more errors in imitation than their younger counterparts. However, older adults seemed to supplement their memory by exploiting an abst...

Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is important for action observation and imitation. In order to further explore the role of IFG in action observation and imitation, we pooled data from seven functional magnetic resonance imaging studies involving observation and imitation of simple finger movements performed in our laboratory. For imitation we fou...

We review three areas of research and theory relating to the involvement of motor processing in action observation: behavioural studies on imitation learning, behavioural work on short-term visuomotor interactions, and related neurophysiological and neuroimaging work. A large number of behavioural studies now indicate bi-directional links between perception and action: visual processing can aut...

To plagiarise is surely the worst of sins for an author; a person who claims originality after copying the works of others is obviously a deceiver. But to live successfully in the world it is not necessary to be original and sinfulness only enters if originality is claimed falsely. In fact, imitation is one method by which the young develop; a child copies the behaviour of its parents, brothers...