Posts tagged imitation
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
(Image caption: Illustration of the mirror neuron system in the human brain. Credit: Jan Brascamp)
Brain mapping confirms patients with schizophrenia have impaired ability to imitate
According to George Bernard Shaw, “Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.” According to psychologists, imitation is something that we all do whenever we learn a new skill, whether it is dancing or how to behave in specific social situations.
Now, the results of a brain-mapping experiment conducted by a team of neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University strengthen the theory that an impaired ability to imitate may underlie the profound and enduring difficulty with social interactions that characterize schizophrenia. In a paper published online on Mar. 14 by the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers report that when patients with schizophrenia were asked to imitate simple hand movements, their brains exhibited abnormal brain activity in areas associated with the ability to imitate.
“The fact that patients with schizophrenia show abnormal brain activity when they imitate simple hand gestures is important because action imitation is a primary building block of social abilities,” said first author Katharine Thakkar, who conducted much of the research while completing her doctoral program at Vanderbilt and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University Medical Center in Utrecht. “The ability to imitate is present early in life and is crucial for learning how to navigate the social world. According to current theory, covert imitation is also the most fundamental way that we understand the intentions and feelings of other people.”
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Visual Feedback Is Necessary for Imitating Facial Expressions
Studies of the chameleon effect confirm what salespeople, tricksters, and Lotharios have long known: Imitating another person’s postures and expressions is an important social lubricant.
But how do we learn to imitate with any accuracy when we can’t see our own facial expressions and we can’t feel the facial expressions of others?
Richard Cook of City University London, Alan Johnston of University College London, and Cecilia Heyes of the University of Oxford investigate possible mechanisms underlying our ability to imitate in two studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
In the first experiment, the researchers videotaped participants as they recited jokes and then asked them to imitate four randomly selected facial expressions from their videos. When they achieved what they perceived to be the target expression, the participants recorded the attempt with the click of a computer mouse.
A computer program evaluated the accuracy of participants’ imitation attempts against a map of the target expression. In contrast to previous studies that relied on subjective assessments, this new technology allowed for automated and objective measurement of imitative accuracy.
In one experiment, the researchers found that participants who were able to see their imitation attempts through visual feedback improved over successive attempts. But participants who had to rely solely on proprioception – sensing the relative position of their facial features – got progressively worse.
These results are consistent with the associative sequence-learning model, which holds that our ability to imitate accurately depends on learned associations between what we see (in the mirror or through feedback from others) and what we feel.
Cook and colleagues conclude that contingent visual feedback may be a useful component of rehabilitation and skill-training programs that are designed to improve individuals’ ability to imitate facial gestures.
Babies rely on words to ‘decode’ underlying intentions of others
A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants’ ability to understand the intentions of others.
As the babies watched intently, an experimenter produced an unusual behavior—she used her forehead to turn on a light. But how did babies interpret this behavior? Did they see it as an intentional act, as something worthy of imitating? Or did they see it as a fluke? To answer this question, the experimenter gave 14-month-old infants an opportunity to play with the light themselves.
The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants’ tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows.
When the experimenter announced her unusual behavior (“I’m going to blick the light”), infants imitated her. But when she did not provide a name, they did not follow suit.
This revealed that infants as young as 14 months of age coordinate their insights about human behavior and their intuitions about human language in the service of discovering which behaviors, observed in others, are ones to imitate.
"This work shows, for the first time, that even for infants who have only just begun to ‘crack the language code,’ language promotes culturally-shared knowledge and actions – naturally, generatively and apparently effortlessly," said Sandra R. Waxman, co-author of the study and the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern.
"This is the first demonstration of how infants’ keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for ‘reading’ the underlying intentions of their ‘tutors’ (adults) and foster infants’ imitation of adults’ actions."
Waxman said absent language and its power in conveying meaning, infants don’t imitate these “strange” actions.
"This means that human language provides infants with a powerful key: it unlocks for them a broader world of social intentions," Waxman said. "We know that language, and especially the shared meaning within a linguistic community, is one of the most powerful conduits of the cultural knowledge that we humans transmit across generations."
(Source: eurekalert.org)