Abstract
Imitation can be defined as the copying of behavior. To a biologist,
interest in imitation is focused on its adaptive value for the survival
of the organism, but to a psychologist, the mechanisms responsible
for imitation are the most interesting. For psychologists, the most
important cases of imitation are those that involve demonstrated
behavior that the imitator cannot see when it performs the behavior
(e.g., scratching one's head). Such examples of imitation are sometimes
referred to as opaque imitation because they are difficult to account
for without positing cognitive mechanisms, such as perspective taking,
that most animals have not been acknowledged to have. The present
review first identifies various forms of social influence and social
learning that do not qualify as opaque imitation, including species-typical
mechanisms (e.g., mimicry and contagion), motivational mechanisms
(e.g., social facilitation, incentive motivation, transfer of fear),
attentional mechanisms (e.g., local enhancement, stimulus enhancement),
imprinting, following, observational conditioning, and learning how
the environment works (affordance learning). It then presents evidence
for different forms of opaque imitation in animals, and identifies
characteristics of human imitation that have been proposed to distinguish
it from animal imitation. Finally, it examines the role played in
opaque imitation by demonstrator reinforcement and observer motivation.
Although accounts of imitation have been proposed that vary in their
level of analysis from neural to cognitive, at present no theory
of imitation appears to be adequate to account for the varied results
that have been found.
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