The dynamic emergence of categories through imitation

Abstract

Introduction Imitation is a powerful mechanism to culturally propagate and maintain knowledge and abilities. Not only humans rely heavily on imitation and social learning in general, but also animals such as dolphins, some bird species and some primates rely on imitation to acquire gestures and articulations (see e.g. Dautenhahn and Nehaniv, 2002b; Whiten and Ham, 1992). Studies on social learning in cognitive science have concentrated on mimicry, joint attention, the relationship between imitator and imitated, theory of mind, intentionality, speech (Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1996) and learning affordances of objects and tools (Tomasello, 1999). All these issues have been considered by artificial intelligence in constructing artefacts that learn from imitation, either in simulation (e.g. Alissandrakis et al ., 2001) or on robotic platforms (e.g. Kuniyoshi et al ., 1994; Gaussier et al ., 1998; Billard and Hayes, 1997; Schaal, 1999). In this chapter however we wish to pay attention to the role of the social medium in which imitation takes place. Often, imitation is considered to take place only between two agents: one acts as teacher and the other as student. The teacher is in possession of a full repertoire of gestures, actions or articulations, which the student has to acquire through imitation learning. This is of course a valid approach when one is interested in the paradigm of imitation to program artefacts by demonstration (Bakker and Kuniyoshi, 1996).