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Across the lifespan and across populations, humans 'overimitate' causally unnecessary behaviors. Such irrelevant-action imitation facilitates faithful cultural transmission, but its immediate benefits to the imitator are controversial. Over short time scales, irrelevant-action imitation may bootstrap artifact exploration or interpersonal affiliation, and over longer time scales it may facilitate acquisition of either causal models or social conventions. To investigate these putative functions, we recruited community samples from two under-studied populations: Yasawa, Fiji, and Huatasani, Peru. We use a two-action puzzle box: first after a video demonstration, and again one month later. Treating age as a continuous variable, we reveal divergent developmental trajectories across sites. Yasawans (44 adults, M = 39.9 years, 23 women; 42 children, M = 9.8 years, 26 girls) resemble documented patterns, with irrelevant-action imitation increasing across childhood and plateauing in adulthood. In contrast, Huatasaneños (48 adults, M = 37.6 years, 33 women; 47 children, M = 9.3 years, 13 girls) evince a parabolic trajectory: adults at the site show the lowest irrelevant-action imitation of any demographic set in our sample. In addition, all age sets in both populations reduce their irrelevant actions at Time 2, but do not reduce their relevant-action imitation or goal attainment. Taken together, and considering the local cultural contexts, our results suggest that irrelevant-action imitation serves a short-term function and is sensitive to the social context of the demonstration., (© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

We review the support for, and criticisms of, the teleological stance theory, often described as a foundation for goal‐directed action understanding early in life. A major point of contention in the literature has been how teleological processes and assumptions of rationality are represented and understood in infancy, and this debate has been largely centered on three paradigms. Visual habituation studies assess infant's abilities to retrospectively assess teleological processes; the presence of such processes is supported by the literature. Rational imitation is a phenomenon that has been questioned both theoretically and empirically, and there is currently little support for this concept in the literature. The involvement of teleological processes in action prediction is unclear. To date, the ontology of teleological processes remains unspecified. To remedy this, we present a new action‐based theory of teleological processes (here referred to as the embodied account of teleological processes), based on the development of goal‐directed reaching with its origin during the fetal period and continuous development over the first few months of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a two-stage model of infants' imitative learning from observed actions and their effects. According to this model, the observation of another person's action activates the corresponding motor code in the infants' motor repertoire (i.e. leads to motor resonance). The second process guiding imitative behavior results from the observed action effects. If the modeled action is followed by a salient action effect, the representation of this effect (i.e. perceptual code) will be associated with the activated motor code. If the infant later aims to obtain the same effect, the corresponding motor program will be activated and the model's action will therefore be imitated. Accordingly, the model assumes that for the imitation of novel actions the modeled action needs to elicit sufficient motor resonance and must be followed by a salient action effect. Using the head touch imitation paradigm, we tested these two assumptions derived from the model. To this end, we manipulated whether the actions demonstrated to the infants were or were not in the motor repertoire, i.e. elicited stronger or less strong motor resonance, and whether they were followed by salient action effects or not. The results were in line with the proposed two-stage model of infants' imitative learning and suggest that motor resonance is necessary, but not sufficient for infants' imitative learning from others' actions and their effects., (© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)

This paper provides evidence for imitative abilities in neonatal chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), our closest relatives. Two chimpanzees were reared from birth by their biological mothers. At less than 7 days of age the chimpanzees could discriminate between, and imitate, human facial gestures (tongue protrusion and mouth opening). By the time they were 2 months old, however, the chimpanzees no longer imitated the gestures. They began to perform mouth opening frequently in response to any of the three facial gestures presented to them. These findings suggest that neonatal facial imitation is most likely an innate ability, developed through natural selection in humans and in chimpanzees. The relationship between the disappearance of neonatal imitation and the development of social communicative behavior is discussed from an evolutionary perspective.

Abstract: The meaning, mechanism, and function of imitation in early infancy have been actively discussed since Meltzoff and Moore's (1977) report of facial and manual imitation by human neonates. Oostenbroek et al. (2016) claim to challenge the existence of early imitation and to counter all interpretations so far offered. Such claims, if true, would have implications for theories of social‐cognitive development. Here we identify 11 flaws in Oostenbroek et al.'s experimental design that biased the results toward null effects. We requested and obtained the authors’ raw data. Contrary to the authors’ conclusions, new analyses reveal significant tongue‐protrusion imitation at all four ages tested (1, 3, 6, and 9 weeks old). We explain how the authors missed this pattern and offer five recommendations for designing future experiments. Infant imitation raises fundamental issues about action representation, social learning, and brain–behavior relations. The debate about the origins and development of imitation reflects its importance to theories of developmental science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of imitation in infants which is prevalent in developmental biology in neonates. It talks about the infants being able to easily imitate tongue protrusions than the control on face expressions. It tells about imitation in neonates helps understand the psychology of infants. It speaks about imitation in infants being a skill learned by the infants even before learning language and developing social cognition.

The study employed four gestural models using frame‐by‐frame microanalytic methods, and followed how the behaviours unfolded over time. Forty‐two human newborns (0–3 days) were examined for their imitation of tongue protrusion, 'head tilt with looking up', three‐finger and two‐finger gestures. The results showed that all three gesture groups were imitated. Results of the temporal analyses revealed an early and a later, second stage of responses. Later responses were characterized by a suppression of similar, but non‐matching movements. Perinatal imitation is not a phenomenon served by a single underlying mechanism; it has at least two different stages. An early phase is followed by voluntary matching behaviour by the neonatal infant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on imitation in infancy has primarily focused on what and when infants imitate. More recently, however, the question why infants imitate has received renewed attention, partly motivated by the finding that infants sometimes selectively imitate the actions of others and sometimes faithfully imitate, or overimitate, the actions of others. The present study evaluates the hypothesis that this varying imitative behavior is related to infants' social traits. To do so, we assessed faithful and selective imitation longitudinally at 12 and 15 months, and extraversion at 15 months. At both ages, selective imitation was dependent on the causal structure of the act. From 12 to 15 months, selective imitation decreased while faithful imitation increased. Furthermore, infants high in extraversion were more faithful imitators than infants low in extraversion. These results demonstrate that the onset of faithful imitation is earlier than previously thought, but later than the onset of selective imitation. The observed relation between extraversion and faithful imitation supports the hypothesis that faithful imitation is driven by the social motivations of the infant. We call this relation the King Louie Effect: like the orangutan King Louie in The Jungle Book, infants imitate faithfully due to a growing interest in the interpersonal nature of interactions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://youtu.be/qlnIof1k-u8. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their discovery in the early 1990s, mirror neurons have been proposed to be related to many social-communicative abilities, such as imitation. However, research into the early manifestations of the putative neural mirroring system and its role in early social development is still inconclusive. In the current EEG study, mu suppression, generally thought to reflect activity in neural mirroring systems was investigated in 18- to 30-month-olds during the observation of object manipulations as well as mimicked actions. EEG power data recorded from frontal, central, and parietal electrodes were analysed. As predicted, based on previous research, mu wave suppression was found over central electrodes during action observation and execution. In addition, a similar suppression was found during the observation of intransitive, mimicked hand movements. To a lesser extent, the results also showed mu suppression at parietal electrode sites, over all three conditions. Mu wave suppression during the observation of hand movements and during the execution of actions was significantly correlated with quality of imitation, but not with age or language level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitation requires the imitator to solve the correspondence problem - to translate visual information from modelled action into matching motor output. It has been widely accepted for some 30 years that the correspondence problem is solved by a specialized, innate cognitive mechanism. This is the conclusion of a poverty of the stimulus argument, realized in the active intermodal matching model of imitation, which assumes that human neonates can imitate a range of body movements. An alternative, wealth of the stimulus argument, embodied in the associative sequence learning model of imitation, proposes that the correspondence problem is solved by sensorimotor learning, and that the experience necessary for this kind of learning is provided by the sociocultural environment during human development. In a detailed and wide-ranging review of research on imitation and imitation-relevant behaviour in infancy and beyond, we find substantially more evidence in favour of the wealth argument than of the poverty argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twenty-two- and 27-month-old children were tested for their understanding of pretending as a specific intentional action form. Pairs of superficially similar behaviors – pretending to perform an action and trying to perform that action – were demonstrated to children. The 27-month-olds, and to some degree the 22-month-olds, showed in their responses that they understood the intentional structure of both kinds of behaviors: after pretense models, they themselves performed appropriate inferential pretense acts, whereas after the trying models they properly performed the action or tried to perform it with novel means. These findings are discussed in the light of recent debates about children's developing understanding of pretense and theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to copy whichever of the two hierarchical approaches they witnessed an adult perform. Responses to an element absent in demonstrations, but present at test, showed that children did not merely copy the chain of events they had witnessed, but acquired hierarchically structured rules to which the new element was assimilated. Consistent with this finding, children did not copy specific sequences of actions at lower hierarchical levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and goal emulation is based in part on individual differences which emerge early in ontogeny. Experimental measurements and parental reports were collected for a group of 2‐year‐old children (N = 48, age = 23–32 months) on their imitative behavior as well as other aspects of cognitive and social development. Results revealed individual differences in children's imitative behavior across trials and tasks which were best characterized by a model that included two behavioral routines; one corresponding to faithful imitation, and one to goal emulation. Moreover, individual differences in faithful imitation and goal emulation were correlated with individual differences in theory of mind, prosocial behavior, and temperament. These findings were discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the mechanisms of social learning, ontogeny of cumulative culture, and the benefit of analyzing individual differences for developmental experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During social interactions we often have an automatic and unconscious tendency to copy or 'mimic' others' actions. The dominant view on the neural basis of mimicry appeals to an automatic coupling between perception and action. It has been suggested that this coupling is formed through associative learning during correlated sensorimotor experience. Although studies with adult participants have provided support for this hypothesis, little is known about the role of sensorimotor experience in supporting the development of perceptual‐motor couplings, and consequently mimicry behaviour, in infancy. Here we investigated whether the extent to which an observed action elicits mimicry depends on the opportunity an infant has had to develop perceptual‐motor couplings for this action through correlated sensorimotor experience. We found that mothers' tendency to imitate their 4‐month‐olds' facial expressions during a parent‐child interaction session was related to infants' facial mimicry as measured by electromyography. Maternal facial imitation was not related to infants' mimicry of hand actions, and instead we found preliminary evidence that infants' tendency to look at their own hands may be related to their tendency to mimic hand actions. These results are consistent with the idea that mimicry is supported by perceptual‐motor couplings that are formed through correlated sensorimotor experience obtained by observing one's own actions and imitative social partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the infant imitation serving as a base for the development of social cognition skills in the neonates. It talks about the infants imitating behavior or facial expression that they are physically able to imitate. It tells about infants imitating expressions inorder to show recognition to other people.