Imitation and culture: What gives?

Abstract

What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture1–Culture3), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. The disagreement arises from ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and confusion between two explanatory projects—the anthropocentric project and the cultural selection project. I argue that imitation gives cultural evolution an inheritance mechanism for communicative and gestural skills (but not technological skills), and cultural selection yields the cognitive mechanisms that make imitation possible.

Faces and Voices Processing in Human and Primate Brains: Rhythmic and Multimodal Mechanisms Underlying the Evolution and Development of Speech

“…In psychological science, imitation is understood as the ability to copy the topography of a behavior (e.g., body movements, vocal or facial expressions) observed in a third person or agent ( Heyes, 2021 ). However, researchers distinguish several forms of imitation that may differ in the complexity of their cognitive underpinnings ( Zentall, 2012 ).…”

Cultural cognition and technology: Mechanical actions speak louder than bodily actions

“…Taken together, these findings support the same conclusions as the one drawn by Whiten [4] with respect to cultural phenomena: How technological know-how is transmitted between individuals and how individuals use this know-how to use tools seem to be first and foremost driven by mechanical-action-centered cognitive processes. This conclusion does not imply that this is true in domains other than the technological one (e.g., communicative gestures, dance), for which bodily-action-centered cognitive processes could play a primary role (for a similar view, see [4,7,8,10]; see also [4]). This is also in accordance to the idea that witnessing a model acting can lead to social learning, which is true not only for humans [35] but also for nonhuman species such as chimpanzees [36].…”

“…The second is to consider that model's actions refer to the motor actions performed by the model (hereafter called bodily action to follow Whiten's [4] terminology). In line with Byrne and Russon's [6] concept of 'program level imitation', Whiten [4] argues that the bodilyaction level is not really relevant -if not misleading -for studying the transmission of technical behavior between individuals and suggests to reorient the focus towards the mechanical-action level (for a similar view, see [7][8][9][10]). Interestingly, the same debate between bodily-actioncentered versus mechanical-action-centered explanations has also occurred in the cognitive science literature to describe the cognitive processes at work when humans use tools (for reviews, see [11,12]).…”

Tradition and invention: The bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution

“…Another important mechanism question asks whether the ritual and instrumental stances differentially recruit imitation and emulation. In imitation, narrowly defined, the observer copies body movementsthe way that parts of the body move relative to one another (e.g., fist to chin)whereas in emulation, the observer reproduces object movements (e.g., purple cube to red peg) (Heyes, 1993;Heyes, 2021a;2021b;Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). Given that many group-defining communicative and ritual actions are intransitive, consisting of gestures and postures that do not involve objects (such as rhythmic dancing, marching, and more generally rituals that rely on joint and synchronous movements; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009), it is likely that the ritual stance primes imitation more strongly than the instrumental stance.…”