Imitation is an advanced behavior Behavior, or behaviour , refers to the actions of an organism or system, usually in relation to its environment, which includes the other organisms or systems around as well as the physical environment. It is the response of the organism or system to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or whereby an individual observes and replicates another's. The word can be applied in many contexts, ranging from animal training Animal training refers to teaching animals specific responses to specific conditions or stimuli. Training may be for the purpose of companionship, detection, protection, entertainment or all of the above to international politics International relations or International studies (IS) represents the study of foreign affairs and global issues among states within the international system, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations (IGOs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and multinational.

Contents

Anthropology and social sciences

In anthropology Anthropology is the study of humanity. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. The term "anthropology", pronounced /ænθrɵˈpɒlədʒi/, is from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, anthrōpos, "human", and -λογία, -logia, "discourse" or "study", and was first, diffusion Cultural diffusion, as first conceptualized by the famous Alfred L. Kroeber in his influential 1940 paper Stimulus Diffusion, or trans-cultural diffusion in later reformulations, is used in cultural anthropology and cultural geography to describe the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages etc.— theories explain why cultures Culture is a term that has different meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses: imitate the ideas In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images. Many philosophers consider ideas to be a fundamental or practices of other cultures. Some theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or a few original cultures, the Adam Adam is a prominent figure in Abrahamic Religions. He is the first man created by God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He appears in the Hebrew Bible, in the Old Testament, and in the Qur'an. His wife was Eve of the Bible The Bible refers to collections of sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity. There is no single version: both the individual books and their order vary. The Hebrew Bible contains 39 books, while Christian Bibles range from the 66 books of the Protestant canon to 81 books in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. The oldest surviving Christian Bibles, 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[1] as well as popular authors[2] have argued that the role of imitation in humans is unique among animals. Psychologist Kenneth Kaye Although spanning several professional disciplines, the substantial body of Kaye’s work is characterized by family systems theory and by a search for observable, reproducible processes rather than stopping at generalizations about formal properties, for example, of stages in mental or social development showed that infants' ability to match the sounds or gestures of an adult depends on an interactive process of turn-taking over many successive trials, in which adults' instinctive behavior plays as great a role as that of the infant.[3] These writers assume that evolution would have selected imitative abilities as fit because those who were good at it had a wider arsenal of learned behavior at their disposal, including tool-making and language.

In the mid-20th century, social scientists began to study how and why people imitate ideas. Everett Rogers Everett M. Rogers was a sociologist, communication scholar, writer, and teacher. He is best known for originating the diffusion of innovations theory and for introducing the term early adopter pioneered innovation diffusion Diffusion of Innovations is a theory of how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures. The concept was first studied by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and by German and Austrian anthropologists such as Friedrich Ratzel or Leo Frobenius. Its basic epidemiological or internal-influence form was described by H studies, identifying factors in adoption and profiles of adopters of ideas.

Imitation is a replication of a meme.

Neuroscience

That we are capable of imitating movements, actions, skills, behaviors, gestures, pantomimes, mimics, vocalisations, sounds, speech etc. and that we have particular 'imitation systems' in the brain is old neurological knowledge dating back to Hugo (Karl) Liepmann 1863-1925 (see Wikipedia). Liepmann's model 1908 "Das hierarchische Modell der Handlungsplanung" (the hierarchical model of action planning) is still valid. On studying the cerebral localization of function, Liepmann postulated that planned or commanded actions were prepared in the parietal lobe of the brain's dominant hemisphere, and also frontally. His most important pioneering work is when extensively studying patients with lesions in these brain areas, he discovered that the patients lost (among other things) the ability to imitate. He was the one who coined the term 'apraxia' and differentiated between ideational and ideomotor apraxia. In this basic and wider frame of classical neurological knowledge the discovery of the mirror neurons has to be seen, which was made in monkeys but of course holds for man as well.

fMRI Functional MRI or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a type of specialized MRI scan. It measures the hemodynamic response (change in blood flow) related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging. Since the early 1990s, fMRI has come to dominate human brain studies revealed a network of regions in the inferior frontal cortex The frontal lobe is an area in the brain of mammals. It is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere and positioned anterior to the parietal lobes and above and anterior to the temporal lobes. It is separated from the parietal lobe by the primary motor cortex, which controls voluntary movements of specific body parts associated with the and inferior parietal cortex The parietal lobe is a lobe in the brain. It is positioned above the occipital lobe and behind (posterior to) the frontal lobe which are typically activated during imitation tasks.[4] It has been suggested that these regions contain mirror neurons A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to occur in humans and other species similar to the mirror neurons recorded in the macaque monkey.[5] However, it is not clear if macaques spontaneously imitate each other in the wild.

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran argues that the evolution of mirror neurons were important in the human acquisition of complex skills such as language and believes the discovery of mirror neurons to be a most important advance in neuroscience.[6] However, little evidence directly supports the theory that mirror neuron activity is involved in

Cognition Cognition is the scientific term for "the process of thought." Usage of the term varies in different disciplines; for example in psychology and cognitive science, it usually refers to an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions. Other interpretations of the meaning of cognition link it to the development of

Sentience Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive. The term is used in science and philosophy, and in the study of artificial intelligence. Sentience is used in the study of consciousness to describe the ability to have sensations or experiences, known to Western philosophers as "qualia". In eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical Consciousness Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note : Sapience Sapience is often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment. Judgment is a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence or alternatively may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties. Robert Sternberg has segregated the capacity for judgment from Self-awareness Self-awareness is the awareness of the self as separate from the thoughts that are occurring at any point in time. Without self awareness the self perceives and believes the thoughts that are occurring to be who the self is. Self awareness gives one the option or choice to choose thoughts being thought rather than simply thinking the thoughts that Concept A concept is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology[citation needed] such as a single meaning of a term Cognitive linguistics In linguistics, cognitive linguistics refers to the branch of linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms. It is thus closely associated with semantics but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findings from

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functions such as empathy The English word is derived from the Greek word ἐμπάθεια , "physical affection, passion, partiality" which comes from ἐν (en), "in, at" + πάθος (pathos), "passion" or "suffering". The term was adapted by Rudolf Lotze and Robert Vischer to create the German word Einfühlung ("feeling or learning by imitation.[7]

Evidence is accumulating that bottlenose dolphins Bottlenose dolphins, the genus Tursiops, are the most common and well-known members of the family Delphinidae, the family of oceanic dolphins. Recent molecular studies show the genus contains two species, the Common Bottlenose Dolphin and the Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops aduncus), instead of one. They inhabit warm and temperate seas employ imitation to learn hunting and other skills from other dolphins.[8][9]

Animal behavior

Scientists debate whether animals can truly imitate novel actions or whether imitation is uniquely human.[10] The current controversy is partly definitional. Thorndike uses “learning to do an act from seeing it done”.[11] It has two major shortcomings: first, by using “seeing” it restricts imitation to the visual domain and excludes e.g. vocal imitation and, second, it would also include mechanisms such as priming, contagious behaviour and social facilitation [12], which most scientist distinguish as separate forms of observational learning Observational learning is a type of learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating novel behavior executed by others. It is argued that reinforcement has the effect of influencing which responses one will partake in, more than it influences the actual acquisition of the new response. Thorpe suggested defining imitation as “the copying of a novel or otherwise improbable act or utterance, or some act for which there is clearly no instinctive Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism toward a particular behavior. The fixed action patterns are unlearned and inherited. The stimuli can be variable due to imprinting in a sensitive period or also genetically fixed. Examples of instinctual fixed action patterns can be observed in the behavior of animals, which perform various tendency”.[13] This definition is favored by many scholars, though questions have been raised how strictly the term “novel” has to be interpreted and how exactly a performed act has to match the demonstration to count as a copy.

In 1952 Hayes & Hayes [14] used the “Do-as-I-do” procedure to demonstrate the imitative abilities of their trained chimpanzee Chimpanzee, sometimes colloquially chimp, is the common name for the two extant species of ape in the genus Pan. The Congo River forms the boundary between the native habitat of the two species: “Viki”. Their study was repeatedly criticized for its subjective interpretations of their subjects' responses. Replications of this study [15] found much lower matching degrees between subjects and models. However, imitation research focusing on the copying fidelity got new momentum from a study by Voelkl and Huber.[16] They analyzed the motion trajectories A trajectory is the path a moving object follows through space. The object might be a projectile or a satellite, for example. It thus includes the meaning of orbit - the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass. A trajectory can be described mathematically either by the geometry of the path, or as the position of both model and observer monkeys A monkey is any cercopithecoid or platyrrhine (New World monkey) primate. All primates that are not prosimians (lemurs and tarsiers) or apes are monkeys. The 264 known extant monkey species represent two of the three groupings of simian primates (the third group being the 21 species of apes). Monkeys are generally considered to be intelligent and, and found a high matching degree in their movement patterns.

Paralleling these studies, comparative psychologists provided tools or apparatuses that could be handled in different ways. Heyes [17][18] and co-workers reported evidence for imitation in rats Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus. Many members of other rodent genera and families are also referred to as rats, and share many that pushed a lever in the same direction as their models, though later on they withdrew their claims due to methodological problems in their original setup.[19] By trying to design a testing paradigm that is less arbitrary than pushing a lever to the left or to the right, Custance and co-workers [20] introduced the “artificial fruit” paradigm, where a small object could be opened in different ways to retrieve food placed inside—not unlike a hard-shelled fruit. Using this paradigm, scientists reported evidence for imitation in monkeys.[21][22] and apes [23][24][25] There remains a problem with such tool (or apparatus) use studies: what animals might learn in such studies need not be the actual behaviour patterns (i.e. the actions) that were observed. Instead they might learn about some effects in the environment (i.e. how the tool moves, or how the apparatus works.[26]) This type of observational learning, which focuses on results, not actions, has been dubbed emulation (see Emulation (observational learning) In emulation learning, subjects learn about parts of their environment and use this to achieve their own goals. First coined by child psychologist David Wood[disambiguation needed] , in 1990 “emulation” was taken up by Michael Tomasello to explain the findings of an earlier study on ape social learning (Tomasello et al., 1987). The meaning of).

See also

References

  1. ^ George Herbert Mead George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general, Mind, Self, and Society; Kenneth Kaye Although spanning several professional disciplines, the substantial body of Kaye’s work is characterized by family systems theory and by a search for observable, reproducible processes rather than stopping at generalizations about formal properties, for example, of stages in mental or social development, The Mental and Social Life of Babies, U. Chicago Press 1982
  2. ^ Susan Blackmore Susan Jane Blackmore, PhD, is an English freelance writer, lecturer, and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal, perhaps best known for her book The Meme Machine, The Meme Machine, Oxford U. Press 2007; Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, HarperCollins 1992.
  3. ^ In M. Bullowa, ed. Before Speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication, Cambridge U. Press 1979; K. Kaye and J. Marcus, Developmental Psychology, 1981, Vol. 17, pp. 258-265.
  4. ^ Marco Iacoboni, Roger P. Woods, Marcel Brass, Harold Bekkering, John C. Mazziotta, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation, Science 286:5449 (1999)
  5. ^ Rizzolatti G., Craighero L., The mirror-neuron system, Annual Review of Neuroscience. 2004;27:169-92
  6. ^ V.S. Ramachandran, Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution. Edge Foundation. Retrieved on 2006-11-16.
  7. ^ Dinstein I, Thomas C, Behrmann M, Heeger DJ (2008). "A mirror up to nature". Curr Biol 18 (1): R13–8. doi A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an electronic document or other object. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata:10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.044. PMID A PMID is a unique number assigned to each PubMed citation of life sciences and biomedical scientific journal articles. The related Pubmed Central archive may additionally assign a separate number, a PMCID (PubMed Central Identifier), normally written with a PMC prefix 18177704.
  8. ^ Krutzen M, Mann J, Heithaus MR, Connor RC, Bejder L, Sherwin WB (2005). "Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, usually referred to as PNAS, is the official journal of the United States National Academy of Sciences. PNAS is an important scientific journal that printed its first issue in 1915 and continues to publish highly cited research reports, commentaries, reviews, 102 (25): 8939–8943. doi A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an electronic document or other object. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata:10.1073/pnas.0500232102. PMID A PMID is a unique number assigned to each PubMed citation of life sciences and biomedical scientific journal articles. The related Pubmed Central archive may additionally assign a separate number, a PMCID (PubMed Central Identifier), normally written with a PMC prefix 15947077.
  9. ^ "Wild dolphins teaches others tail walking tricks". WDCS, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. http://www.wdcs.org.au/story_details.php?select=20.
  10. ^ Zentall, T.R. (2006). Imitation: Definitions, evidence, and mechanisms. Animal Cognition, 9, 335-353. Full text
  11. ^ Thorndike, E.L. (1898). Animal intelligence. “Psychological Review Monographs 2,” No. 8.
  12. ^ Heyes, C.M. and B.G.J. Galef, (1996). “Social Learning in Animals: The Roots of Culture.” San Diego, Academic Press.
  13. ^ Thorpe, W.H. (1963). “Learning and Instinct in Animals.” London, Methuen.
  14. ^ Hayes, K.J. and Hayes, C. (1952). Imitation in a home-raised chimpanzee. “Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 45,” 450-459.
  15. ^ Custance, D.-M., Whiten, A. and Bard, K.A. (1995). Can young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) imitate arbitrary actions? Hayes & Hayes (1952) revisited. “Behaviour, 132,”. 837-859.
  16. ^ Voelkl, B. and Huber, L. (2007): Imitation as faithful copying of a novel technique in marmoset monkeys. “PLoS one 2 (7),” e611. Full text
  17. ^ Heyes, C.M., Dawson, G.R. and Nokes, T. (1992). Imitation in rats: initial responding and transfer evidence. “The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45 B,” 229-240.
  18. ^ Heyes, C.M. and Dawson, G.R. (1990). A demonstration of observational learning in rats using a bidirectional control. “The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42 B,” 59-71.
  19. ^ Heyes, C.M., Ray, E.D., Mitchell, C.J. and Nokes, T. (2000). Stimulus Enhancement: Controls for Social Facilitation and Local Enhancement. “Learning and Motivation, 31,” 83–98.
  20. ^ Custance, D., Whiten, A., and Fredman, T. (1999). Social learning of an artificial fruit task in capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). "Journal of Comparative Psychology, 113," 13-23.
  21. ^ Bugnyar, T. and Huber, L. (1997). Push or pull: an experimental study on imitation in marmosets. “Animal Behaviour, 1997,” 817-831.
  22. ^ Voelkl, B. and Huber, L. True imitation in marmosets. “Animal Behaviour, 60,” 195-202.
  23. ^ Whiten, A., Custance, D.M., Gomez, J.C., Teixidor, P., and Bard, K.A. (1996). Imitative learning of artificial fruit processing in children (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). “Journal of Comparative Psychology 110,” 3-14.
  24. ^ Stoinsky, T. S. Wrate, J. L. Ure, N. Whiten, A. (2001). Imitative Learning by Captive Western Lowland Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in a Simulated Food-Processing Task. ”Journal of Comparative Psychology, 115,” 272-281.
  25. ^ Whiten, A., Horner, V., Litchfield, C.A., and Marshall-Pescini, S. (2004). How do apes ape? “Learning and Behavior 32,” 36-52.
  26. ^ Tennie, C, Call, J, Tomasello, M. (2006). Push or pull: emulation versus imitation in great apes and human children. Ethology, 112, 1159-1169. Full text

Further reading

Categories: Social learning theory

 

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