Learning by imitation is a powerful process for acquiring new knowledge, but there has been little research exploring imitation’s potential service to the problem-solving domain. Classical problem-solving techniques tend to center around reinforcement learning, which requires significant trial-and-error learning to reach successful goals and problem solutions. Heuristics, hints, and reasoning b...

Deferred imitation after a 1-week delay was examined in 14-month-old infants. Six actions, each using a different object, were demonstrated to each infant. One of the six actions was a novel behavior that had a zero probability of occurrence in spontaneous play. In the imitation condition, infants observed the demonstration but were not allowed to touch the objects, thus preventing any immediat...

Existing theories regarding effects of social networks on trust problems stress the influence of information about behavior of potential partners in the past and possibilities to sanction untrustworthy others in the future. Effects of imitation are less extensively elaborated in the literature. In this paper, we develop a theory about (rational) imitation in combination with other network effec...

This review investigates two recent developments in artificial intelligence and neural computation: learning from imitation and the development of humanoid robots. It is postulated that the study of imitation learning offers a promising route to gain new insights into mechanisms of perceptual motor control that could ultimately lead to the creation of autonomous humanoid robots. Imitation learn...

Imitation is a basic form of motor learning during development. We have a preference to imitate the actions of others as if looking in a mirror (specular imitation: i.e., when the actor moves the left hand, the imitator moves the right hand) rather than with the anatomically congruent hand (anatomic imitation: i.e., actor and imitator both moving the right hand). We hypothesized that this prefe...

Background Although research has demonstrated that the mirror neuron system (MNS) plays a crucial role in both action imitation and action-related semantic processing, whether action-related words can inversely modulate the MNS activity remains unclear. Methods Here, three types of task-irrelevant words (body parts, verbs, and manufactured objects) were presented to examine the modulation eff...

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 ri...

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation and subject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are due to different informational assumptions, not to different behavioral rules. It is more important whom one imitates rather than how. In a laboratory experiment we test the differe...