Imitation is a powerful form of learning commonly used by children, adults and infants. A child's enthusiasm for imitative behavior prompts parental attention and interaction, and provides a mechanism for transmitting appropriate cultural and social behavior. Although simple imitative behavior is evident in the postnatal period, by around 14 months infants remember and repeat actions they obser...

Recent evidence suggests that automatic imitation is mediated by an observation-execution matching system that cannot be reduced to the same processes responsible for other stimulusresponse (S-R) compatibilities. A computational model is developed with different patterns of connectivity for imitative and spatial compatibilities, and it is successful in simulating the results from three differen...

The study of imitative learning in animals has suffered from the presence of a number of confounding motivational and attentional factors (e.g., social facilitation and stimulus enhancement). The two-action method avoids these problems by exposing observers to demonstrators performing a response (e.g., operating a treadle) using 1 of 2 distinctive topographies (e.g., by pecking or by stepping)....

Children seem to have a natural tendency to imitate and their interest for particular kinds of imitative behaviour varies greatly with the infant’s age. We argue that different forms of children’s early imitation may be the result of an intrinsic motivation system driving the infant into situations of maximal learning progress. We present a computational model showing how an agent can learn to ...

Creative designers often see solutions to pending design problems in the everyday objects surrounding them. This can often lead to innovation and insight, sometimes revealing new functions and purposes for common design pieces in the process. We are interested in modeling serendipitous recognition of solutions to pending problems in the context of creative mechanical design. This paper characte...

Imitation and innovation work in tandem to support cultural learning in children and facilitate our capacity for cumulative culture. Here we propose an integrated theoretical account of how the unique demands of acquiring instrumental skills and cultural conventions provide insight into when children imitate, when they innovate, and to what degree. For instrumental learning, with an increase in...

This article examines how waiting to imitate a product affects the performance of the imitator compared to the innovator. Specifically, we address two research questions. Under what conditions does imitation erode the advantage of the innovator? What strategies of imitators help overcome the innovator’s advantage? Our main argument is that the increasing availability of information on the innov...

We argue that infants perform an abstraction over their auditory representations of the vowels of individual speakers, by mapping them to a mediating space of speaker-independent representations, guided by vocal imitative interaction with their caretakers, as a first step in the phonological acquisition process. Furthermore, we proffer a methodology for modeling this abstraction which involves ...

What are the key features of creative teachers’ pedagogical practice and just how do teachers teach creatively and teach for creativity, thus fostering children’s creative learning? This chapter seeks to respond to these questions putting forward a three-dimensional model in which creative practice is seen as a product of the dynamic interplay between the teacher’s personal qualities, the pedag...