The association between imitation recognition and socio-communicative competencies in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Sarah M Pope,William D Hopkins,Jamie L Russell

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00188

Abstract

Imitation recognition provides a viable platform from which advanced social cognitive skills may develop. Despite evidence that non-human primates are capable of imitation recognition, how this ability is related to social cognitive skills is unknown. In this study, we 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. 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. These findings suggest that the neural constructs underlying imitation recognition are likely associated with or among those underlying more general socio-communicative abilities in chimpanzees. Implications regarding how imitation recognition may facilitate other social cognitive processes, such as mirror self-recognition, are discussed.

Highlights

An important form of human cognition and learning is imitation
We predicted that if imitation recognition is associated with other socio-communicative abilities in chimpanzees, rather than a distinct process, subjects that perform well on the imitation recognition tasks will perform significantly better on socially oriented Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB) tasks than apes that performed poorly
For all three types of behavior repetitions (BRs), post hoc analysis indicated that the number of responses in the imitation trials (IMs) condition were significantly higher than in the contingent non-matching (CNM), non-contingent non-matching (NCNM), and no action (NA) conditions

Summary

Introduction

An important form of human cognition and learning is imitation. Imitation is defined as reproducing an action after seeing it performed (modified from Thorndike, 1898). The MNS has been hypothesized to underlie other social cognitive processes that are predicated on the “likeme” system such as empathy, theory of mind, sympathy, and joint attention (Meltzoff and Decety, 2003; Decety, 2010) In support of this hypothesis are cross-sectional and longitudinal developmental data from children showing significant associations between imitation skills and a variety of other socio-communicative abilities such as empathy (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999), joint attention (Carpenter et al, 1995; Charman et al, 2000), expressive language (Tomasello et al, 1993; Slaughter and McConnell, 2003) and, of special interest, mirror self-recognition (MSR; Asendorpf et al, 1996; Nielsen and Dissanayake, 2004). Given the functional activation of the MNS during MSR in humans, (Uddin et al, 2005, 2007), it is not implausible that the MNS may have evolved to serve imitative and social cognitive purposes with MSR abilities arising as a byproduct

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