Homo imitans? Seven reasons why imitation couldn't possibly be associative

Abstract

One contribution of 16 to a theme issue 'Understanding self and other: from origins to disorders'. Many comparative and developmental psychologists believe that we are Homo imitans; humans are more skilled and prolific imitators than other animals, because we have a special, inborn 'intermodal matching' mechanism that integrates representations of others with representations of the self. In contrast, the associative sequence learning (ASL) model suggests that human infants learn to imitate using mechanisms that they share with other animals, and the rich resources provided by their sociocultural environments. This article answers seven objections to the ASL model: (i) it presents evidence that newborns do not imitate; (ii) argues that infants receive a plentiful supply of the kind of experience necessary for learning to imitate; (iii) suggests that neither infants nor adults can imitate elementally novel actions; (iv) explains why non-human animals have a limited capacity for imitation; (v) discusses the goaldirectedness of imitation; (vi) presents evidence that improvement in imitation depends on visual feedback; and (vii) reflects on the view that associative theories steal 'the soul of imitation'. The empirical success of the ASL model indicates that the mechanisms which make imitation possible, by aligning representations of self with representations of others, have been tweaked by cultural evolution, not built from scratch by genetic evolution.

Why developmental psychology is incomplete without comparative and cross-cultural perspectives

“…The papers contributed by Heyes [22], Schmelz & Call [23] and Keller [24] as a collective, demonstrate the inordinate value accrued to attempts at understanding the evolution of the human mind by collating research endeavours from developmental, comparative and cross-cultural psychology. Our aim here is to build on this triadic approach, to argue for its value and to provide insight into some of the key elements that make us who we are: social learning, cooperation, prosociality and understanding of other minds.…”

The evolution of cognitive mechanisms in response to cultural innovations

“…This definition leaves open the question of whether social-learning mechanisms have evolved specifically to serve their social function or whether they are domain-general associative learning mechanisms that are also used to learn socially. In a series of thought-provoking papers, Heyes and her colleagues (1,2,(31)(32)(33) have demonstrated that most mechanisms of social learning and imitation that are normally viewed as specialized adaptations for social life (4,5,34) can also be explained by domain-general associative learning principles. In this light, and in the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, they also suggested that there is no need to posit that these domain-general mechanisms were shaped by their social or cultural function (35).…”

A social insect perspective on the evolution of social learning mechanisms

“…Nonetheless, very recent work has begun to focus on potentially emulative behavior even in bees (8,9), and it is not our intention to imply that such processes follow a different evolutionary pathway to other forms of social learning. In fact, associative explanations for imitation are prominent in the psychology literature [40,88; see also Lotem et al (33)]. Explaining how individuals copy a novel sequence of actions through imitation invokes a "correspondence problem" (89,90) because the seen movements of others must somehow be matched to motor representations of self-movements.…”