Imitation

Summary

Imitation (from Latin imitatio, "a copying, imitation") is a behavior whereby an individual observes and replicates another's behavior. Imitation is also a form of that leads to the "development of traditions, and ultimately our culture. It allows for the transfer of information (behaviors, customs, etc.) between individuals and down generations without the need for genetic inheritance." The word imitation can be applied in many contexts, ranging from animal training to politics. The term generally refers to conscious behavior; subconscious imitation is termed mirroring. Anthropology and social sciences In anthropology, some theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one of a few original cultures or several cultures whose influence overlaps geographically. Evolutionary diffusion theory holds that cultures influence one another, but that similar ideas can be developed in isolation. Scholars as well as popular authors have argued that the role of imitation in humans

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imitation

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This paper is based on the premise that economic growth is driven by an interplay between innovation and imitation in an economy composed of interacting ̄rms operating in a stochastic environment. A novel approach to modeling imitation is presented based on range-dependent processes that describe how ̄rms consider proximity when imitating peers who are found in a given neighborhood in terms of productivity. Using a particularly tractable approach, we are able to analyze how drastically di®erent economic growth scenarios emerge from di®erent im- itation strategies. These emerging scenarios range from di®usive growth where the variance of productivity grows inde ̄nitely, to balanced growth described by a traveling wave with ̄xed variance. The latter scenario is sustained only when imitation strength among ̄rms exceeds a critical bifurcation threshold.

2019

Apraxia is a poorly understood disorder of voluntary movement that is not due to basic sensory, motor or cognitive deficits. We conducted a study on the imitation of meaningless gestures in apraxic patients with left fronto-temporo-parietal lesions. In a first condition, the patients were instructed to imitate the orientation and position of a hand touching the face (complex task). In a second condition, the patients were instructed to solely imitate the position of contact between the face and hand, using any orientation of the hand (simple task). We did not observe contact position errors (CPEs) in the simple task, which argues in favor of preserved spatial and motor representations of the body. However, the patients made a substantial amount of CPEs in the complex task, indicating a misuse of these spatial and motor representations of the body when the task involved several imitation goals (e.g. the thumb touches the nose and the hand is oriented vertically). The error variability was remarkably low across trials. Most of the CPEs could be explained by an incorrect coordination between the reproductions of multiple imitation goals. If simple movements are easier to imitate and less prone to errors, an efficient rehabilitation therapy may use movements of increasing complexity.

2010

Imitation is a fundamental mechanism by which humans learn and understand the actions of others. This thesis addresses the low-level neural mechanisms underlying the imitation of meaningless gestures, using tools from computational neuroscience. We investigate how the human brain perceives these gestures and translates them into appropriate motor commands. In addition, we take a relatively unexplored neuropsychological perspective, which looks at imitation following a brain lesion. The analysis of how imitation breaks down in apraxia, a complex disorder of voluntary movement, enables us to reverse engineer brain function through the identification of those building blocks that are preserved. To better understand the phenomenon of apraxia, we develop a neurocomputational model of imitation that proposes potential neuroanatomical correlates, such as the flow of information across the two brain hemispheres. The model accounts for the pattern of errors observed in apraxic patients with disconnected brain hemispheres. To validate the predictions of our model, we further analyze the experimental errors and uncover a goal-dissociation, where a goal is defined as the spatial relation between two body parts. The experimental observations suggest that the imitation deficit in apraxia arises from an incorrect coordination between the reproductions of multiple goals. A prediction of this hypothesis was validated on three apraxic patients. The collected body of kinematic and neuropsychological data allowed us to refine our neurocomputational model of imitation, and to propose a biologically plausible mathematical model for the execution stage of the imitation. The model controls movement by following nonlinear dynamics, and precisely reproduces both the spatial and temporal aspects of unconstrained and natural three-dimensional reaching movements. Importantly, the model is stable and robust against external perturbations. Overall, our computational models and neuropsychological experiments contribute to a better understanding of how the brain performs the imitation of meaningless gestures; that is, by first decomposing the gesture into imitation goals, and then reproducing these goals through the association of different sensory modalities.

EPFL2009