Interactive behavior of biological agents represents an important area in life as we know it. Behavior matching and imitation may serve as fundamental mechanisms for the development of societies and individuals. Imitation and observational learning as means for acquiring new behaviors also represent a largely untapped resource for robotics and artificial life — both in the study of life as it c...

Imitation learning is an effective approach for autonomous systems to acquire control policies when an explicit reward function is unavailable, using supervision provided as demonstrations from an expert, typically a human operator. However, standard imitation learning methods assume that the agent receives examples of observation-action tuples that could be provided, for instance, to a supervi...

Human infants are capable of accurately matching facial gestures of an experimenter within a few hours after birth, a phenomenon called neonatal imitation. Recent studies have suggested that rather than being a simple reflexive-like behavior, infants exert active control over imitative responses and 'provoke' previously imitated gestures even after a delay of up to 24 h. Delayed imitation is re...

This study examines the effects of different uncertainty types on interorganizational imitation in firm exit decisions. We draw upon herding models to conceptualize exit decisions as being based on a firm’s private information, which the firm updates with information inferred from observing the actions of others. We posit that different types of uncertainty differentially affect this observatio...

OBJECTIVE Converging evidence indicates that brain abnormalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involve atypical network connectivity, but few studies have integrated functional with structural connectivity measures. This multimodal investigation examined functional and structural connectivity of the imitation network in children and adolescents with ASD, and its links with clinical symptoms...

The single word speech shadowing task typically produces spontaneous imitation of the speech of the shadowed talker (the model). This task has been used as a tool for examining speech convergence in a non-social setting and has provided data for claims that the mental lexicon is constituted from instance-based exemplars. We examined whether the speech of participants who shadowed or explicitly ...

BACKGROUND/AIM Children with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation skills, which impede the acquisition of more complex behavior and socialization. Imitation is often targeted early in intervention plans and continues to be addressed throughout the child's treatment. The use of integrated approach to yoga therapy (IAYT) as a complementary therapy for children diagnosed with autism sp...

Speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor's speech during communicative interaction. This study aims at examining the neural correlates of phonetic convergence and deliberate imitation, in order to explore whether imitation of phonetic features, deliberate, or unconscious, might reflect a sensory-motor recalibration process. Sixteen participants listened to vowels with pitch varyi...