Imitation
Broadly speaking, imitation is the transformation of others’ actions into one’s own (modified from Thorndike, 1898).
This project’s primary goal is to understand the association between social cognition and imitation in humans and nonhuman primates. The question of whether imitative abilities are uniquely human is a matter of considerable debate. Many researchers claim that truly imitative behaviors are nonexistent in nonhuman primates. However, there is considerable evidence indicating that apes’ and humans’ imitative capacities are not so different after all (see Whiten, 2017, for a review).
Related Publications
Basics:
Imitation recognition is the ability to recognize when one is being imitated. This is evidenced by so-called ‘testing behaviors’ that occur during an imitation event.
This study compared imitation recognition performance, as indicated by the production of testing behaviors, with performance on a series of tasks that assess social and physical cognition in 49 chimpanzees.
Results:
In the initial analyses, we found that males were more responsive than females to being imitated and engaged in significantly greater behavior repetitions and testing sequences. We also found that subjects who consistently recognized being imitated performed better on social but not physical cognitive tasks, as measured by the Primate Cognitive Test Battery.
Figure 1 from Pope et al. 2017
Basics:
Human imitation is supported by an underlying “mirror system” made up of inferior frontal, inferior parietal, and superior temporal cortical regions. Across primate species, differences in connectivity within these regions may underly variation in imitative abilities.
We hypothesized that “Do As I Do” (DAID) imitation training would enhance white matter integrity within and these regions. To this end, four captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were trained to reproduce 23 demonstrated actions, and four age-/ sex-matched controls were trained to produce basic husbandry behaviors in response to manual cues.
Diffusion tensor images (DTI) were acquired before and after 600 min of training over an aver- age of 112 days. Bilateral and asymmetrical changes in frontoparie- totemporal white matter integrity were compared between DAID trained subjects and controls.
- Excerpt from Pope et al. 2017 abstract.
Results:
We found that imitation trained subjects exhibited leftward shifts in both mean fractional anisotropy and tract strength asymmetry measures in brain regions within the mirror system. This is the first report of training-induced changes in white matter integrity in chimpanzees and suggests that frontoparietotemporal connectivity, particularly in the left hemisphere, may have facilitated the emergence of increasingly complex imitation learning abilities.
- Excerpt from Pope et al. 2017 abstract.
