Theory Of Imitation Research Articles

Imitation analysis

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe a method of estimating the likelihood that a person with particular characteristics will imitate a particular new behaviour (i.e. the use of an innovation). This estimation can be used to provide a new form of forecast for the likely market demand for an innovation. Design/methodology/approach - This method, termed imitation analysis, is based on imitation theories from the behavioural sciences and is applied in two recent case studies in The Netherlands: broadcast TV on mobile phones and a mobile friend-network service. Findings - These cases illustrate how: the market segments with the highest potential can be identified; marketing communication can be focused on specific issues important for each segment (e.g. based on the highest imitation potential); product design can be improved (by highlighting the characteristics with the most room for improving the imitation potential); and market demand can be modelled (the overall chance of imitation occurring). Practical implications - Management implications for the two services, as well as the usefulness of imitation analysis in forecasting studies, are discussed. Originality/value - The paper expands on original work published in this journal in 2005, showing the value of the approach in real-world settings. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

L’art comme phénoménologie de la subjectivité absolue: Henry et Balzac

First we try to show that Henry's philosophy of art meets Schelling's ambition of exposing art as an organon of a philosophy of pathetic subjectivity (against the theory of imitation or reproduction). In this regard, Balzac's novels serve as an illustration showing art to be the model of nature and not the other way round. Then Balzac's main novel dealing with artistic creation, the Unknown Masterpiece, is interpreted using Henry's grid, as an anticipation of Kandinsky's abstraction.

Guðmundur Finnbogason, "Sympathetic understanding," and early Icelandic psychology.

Gudmundur Finnbogason (1873-1944) was a pioneer of Icelandic psychology. He was educated at the University of Copenhagen where he finished his M.A. in 1901 in philosophy, specializing in psychology. During the years 1901-1905, Finnbogason played a major role in establishing and shaping the future of primary education in Iceland. He defended his doctoral thesis on "sympathetic understanding" at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. This work deals with the psychology of imitation. In it Finnbogason defends the view that imitation is basically perception so that there is a direct link from perception to motor behavior. Through imitation people tend to assume the countenance and demeanor of other people, thus showing, in Finnbogason's terminology, "sympathetic understanding." Finnbogason's theory of imitation in many respects anticipates contemporary approaches to the psychology of imitation. In 1918 Finnbogason became professor of applied psychology at the recently founded University of Iceland. Here he attempted to establish psychology as an independent discipline. In this he was unsuccessful; his chair was abolished in 1924.

Older siblings influence younger siblings' motor development

AbstractEvidence exists for two competing theories about the effects of having an older sibling on development. Previous research has found that having an older sibling has both advantages and disadvantages for younger siblings' development. This study examined whether and how older siblings influenced the onset of their own younger siblings' motor milestones, a heretofore unstudied developmental domain in the sibling literature. Parents of 51 sibling pairs reported their children's crawling and walking onset dates. In keeping with imitation theories, in families where younger siblings crawled or walked earlier than their own older sibling, they did so significantly earlier. Moreover, in keeping with limited parental resource theories, in families where older siblings crawled or walked earlier than their own younger sibling, they did so significantly earlier. Older siblings did influence younger siblings' motor development, but how they did so may have depended on unique family characteristics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Intact automatic imitation of human and robot actions in autism spectrum disorders

The existence of a specialized imitation module in humans is hotly debated. Studies suggesting a specific imitation impairment in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) support a modular view. However, the voluntary imitation tasks used in these studies (which require socio-cognitive abilities in addition to imitation for successful performance) cannot support claims of a specific impairment. Accordingly, an automatic imitation paradigm (a 'cleaner' measure of imitative ability) was used to assess the imitative ability of 16 adults with ASD and 16 non-autistic matched control participants. Participants performed a prespecified hand action in response to observed hand actions performed either by a human or a robotic hand. On compatible trials the stimulus and response actions matched, while on incompatible trials the two actions did not match. Replicating previous findings, the Control group showed an automatic imitation effect: responses on compatible trials were faster than those on incompatible trials. This effect was greater when responses were made to human than to robotic actions ('animacy bias'). The ASD group also showed an automatic imitation effect and a larger animacy bias than the Control group. We discuss these findings with reference to the literature on imitation in ASD and theories of imitation.

Book Review Feature: Two Reviews ofThe Challenge of Affulence: Self‐Control and Well‐Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950

Is affluence a good thing? The book The Challenge of Affluence by Avner Offer (2006) argues that economic prosperity weakens self‐control and undermines human well‐being. Consistent with a pessimistic view, we show that psychological distress has been rising through time in modern Great Britain. Taking over‐eating as an example, our data reveal that half the British population view themselves as overweight, and that happiness and mental health are worse among fatter people in Britain and Germany. Comparisons also matter. We discuss problems of inference and argue that longitudinal data are needed. We suggest a theory of obesity imitation where utility depends on relative weight.

General processes, rather than "goals," explain imitation errors.

The goal-directed theory of imitation (GOADI) states that copying of action outcomes (e.g., turning a light switch) takes priority over imitation of the means by which those outcomes are achieved (e.g., choice of effector or grip). The object < effector < grip error pattern in the pen-and-cups task provides strong support for GOADI. Experiment 1 replicated this effect using video stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that shifting the color cue from objects to effectors makes imitation of effector selection more accurate than imitation of object and grip selection. Experiment 3 replicated this result when participants were required to describe actions. Experiment 4 indicated that, when participants are imitating and describing actions, enhancing grip discriminability makes grip selection the most accurately executed component of the task. Consistent with theories that hypothesize that imitation relies on task-general mechanisms (e.g., the associative sequence learning model, ideomotor theory), these findings suggest that imitation is no more or less goal directed than other tasks involving action observation.

Methodological issues in measures of imitative reaction times

Ideomotor (IM) theory suggests that observing someone else perform an action activates an internal motor representation of that behaviour within the observer. Evidence supporting the case for an ideomotor theory of imitation has come from studies that show imitative responses to be faster than the same behavioural measures performed in response to spatial cues. In an attempt to replicate these findings, we manipulated the salience of the visual cue and found that we could reverse the advantage of the imitative cue over the spatial cue. We suggest that participants utilised a simple visuomotor mechanism to perform all aspects of this task, with performance being driven by the relative visual salience of the stimuli. Imitation is a more complex motor skill that would constitute an inefficient strategy for rapid performance.

Imitation: definitions, evidence, and mechanisms

Imitation can be defined as the copying of behavior. To a biologist, interest in imitation is focused on its adaptive value for the survival of the organism, but to a psychologist, the mechanisms responsible for imitation are the most interesting. For psychologists, the most important cases of imitation are those that involve demonstrated behavior that the imitator cannot see when it performs the behavior (e.g., scratching one's head). Such examples of imitation are sometimes referred to as opaque imitation because they are difficult to account for without positing cognitive mechanisms, such as perspective taking, that most animals have not been acknowledged to have. The present review first identifies various forms of social influence and social learning that do not qualify as opaque imitation, including species-typical mechanisms (e.g., mimicry and contagion), motivational mechanisms (e.g., social facilitation, incentive motivation, transfer of fear), attentional mechanisms (e.g., local enhancement, stimulus enhancement), imprinting, following, observational conditioning, and learning how the environment works (affordance learning). It then presents evidence for different forms of opaque imitation in animals, and identifies characteristics of human imitation that have been proposed to distinguish it from animal imitation. Finally, it examines the role played in opaque imitation by demonstrator reinforcement and observer motivation. Although accounts of imitation have been proposed that vary in their level of analysis from neural to cognitive, at present no theory of imitation appears to be adequate to account for the varied results that have been found.

Imitation—theory and experimental evidence

We introduce a generalized theoretical approach to study imitation and subject it to rigorous experimental testing. In our theoretical analysis we find that the different predictions of previous imitation models are mainly explained by different informational assumptions, and to a lesser extent by different behavioral rules. In a laboratory experiment we test the different theories by systematically varying information conditions. We find significant effects of seemingly innocent changes in information. Moreover, the generalized imitation model predicts the differences between treatments well. The data provide support for imitation on the individual level, both in terms of choice and in terms of perception. Furthermore, individuals’ propensity to imitate more successful actions is increasing in payoff differences.

An Overreaction Implementation of the Coherent Market Hypothesis and Option Pricing

Inspired by the theory of social imitation (Weidlich 1970) and its adaptation to financial markets by the Coherent Market Hypothesis (Vaga 1990), we present a behavioral model of stock prices that supports the overreaction hypothesis. Using our dynamic stock price model, we develop a two factor general equilibrium model for pricing derivative securities. The two factors of our model are the stock price and a market polarization variable which determines the level of overreaction. We consider three kinds of market scenarios: Risk-neutral investors, representative Bernoulli investors and myopic Bernoulli investors. In case of the latter two, risk premia provide that herding as well as contrarian investor behaviour may be rationally explained and justified in equilibrium. Applying Monte Carlo methods, we examine the pricing of European call options. We show that option prices depend significantly on the level of overreaction, regardless of prevailing risk preferences: Downward overreaction leads to high option prices and upward overreaction results in low option prices.

Why Do Firms Imitate Each Other?

Scholars from diverse disciplines have proposed numerous theories of business imitation. We organize these theories into two broad categories: (1) information-based theories, where firms follow others that are perceived as having superior information, and (2) rivalry-based theories, where firms imitate others to maintain competitive parity or limit rivalry. We describe conditions under which each type of imitation is most likely and offer guidance on identifying imitation in practice. Amplification effects and other performance implications of imitation are also addressed.

A computational model of intention reading in imitation

Imitation in artificial systems involves a number of important aspects, such as extracting the relevant features of the demonstrated behaviour, inverse mapping observations, and executing motor commands. In this article we focus on how an artificial system can infer what the demonstrator intended to do. The model that we propose draws inspiration from developmental psychology and contains three crucial features. One is that the imitating agent needs repeated trials, thus stepping away from the one-shot learning by demonstration paradigm. The second is that the imitating agent needs a learning method in which it keeps track of intentions to reach goals. The third feature is that the model does not require an external measure of equivalence; instead, the demonstrator decides whether an attempted imitation was equivalent to the demonstration or not. We present a computational model and its simulation results, which underpin our theory of goal-directed imitation on an artificial system.

On Some Processes and Distributions in a Collective Model of Investors' Behavior

This article considers a model for alternative processes for securities prices and compares this model with actual return data of several securities. The distributions of returns that appear in the model can be Gaussian as well as non-Gaussian; in particular they may have two peaks. We consider a discrete Markov chain model. This model in some aspects is similar to well-known Ising model describing ferromagnetics. Namely we consider a set of N investors, each of whom has either bullish or bearish opinion, denoted by plus or minus respectively. At every time step each of N investors can change his/her sign. The probability of a plus becoming a minus and the probability of a minus becoming a plus depends only on the bullish sentiment described as the number of bullish investors among the total of N investors. The number of bullish investors then forms a Markov chain whose transition matrix is calculated explicitly. The transition matrix of that chain is ergodic and any initial distribution of bullish investors converges to stationary. Stationary distributions of bullish investors in this Markov chain model are similar to continuous distributions of the theory of social imitation of Callen and Shapero. Distributions obtained this way can represent 3 types of market behavior: one-peaked distribution that is close to Gaussian, transition market (flattening of the top), and two-peaked distribution.

Urban Imitations

Although long forgotten, the sociology of Gabriel Tarde has suddenly re-emerged. This article backs up the renewed interest in Tarde in four ways. First, drawing upon the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it demonstrates that the usual critique of Tarde is false: Tarde’s theory of imitation is not trapped in any kind of psychologism but is, indeed, a pure sociology. Against this background, the second part of the article argues that the notion of imitation is closely tied to urbanity, which brings Tarde close to the spatial turn of social thought. While Tarde’s work thus seems compatible with contemporary sociological currents, it also transcends what is presently discussed. The third part of the article therefore examines Tarde’s analysis of urban crowds, as the crowd demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the social. Finally, drawing upon Henri Lefebvre, the article outlines the contours of a particular, contemporary Tardean analysis of imitations. More specifically, the suggestion is to add a more explicitly structural dimension to Tarde’s work, which, it is argued, may be accomplished by pursuing a rhythmanalysis. The rhythmanalysis enables one to bring together Tarde’s focus on imitation, urbanity and crowds.

Mirroring, imitation, identification: the sense of self in relation to the mother's internal world

The phenomenon of neonatal imitation, and the use of mutual imitation by mother and baby in the service of attunement, are considered in relation to psychoanalytic theories of mirroring, imitation and identification. Material from infant observation and from the treatment of two children on the autistic spectrum is discussed in terms of the suggestion that developmental imitation implies a perceived position of balance between the external baby and the mother's supposed internal occupant. This is seen as making possible introjective identification and assimilation, with the enrichment of the sense of identity, in contrast to the kind of imitation involving mimicry, in which adhesive or projective identification may be operative.

Women of the Prologue: Imitation, Myth, and Magic in 'Don Quixote I' by Carolyn A. Nadeau (review)

238 Reviews Bueno; the 'nivolesque' qualities manifested in Amor y pedagogia and Niebla reappear in many of the aspects of Como se hace una novela; and the novels of passion present a balanced contrast between two aspects of what Unamuno sought to achieve when he said that in them 'intente escarbar en ciertos sotanos y escondrijos del corazon'. (p. 222) The other theme is concerned with exploring the way in which the novels exemplify and dramatize the dichotomies of word and flesh, mind and body, 'often reaching the level of tragic conflict' (p. 225). Inevitably we are led to identify this kind of conflict with Unamuno's own inner struggle, which Olson perceptively reassesses on the basis primarily of the evidence contained in the novels, both in their structure and in their content. We are shown that, with the possible exception of Abel Sdnchez, the novels resist closure, and that this resistance is inseparable from Unamuno's own insatiable desire for more life, for something beyond the closure of our individual existence. Repeatedly, he uses the trope ofthe Chinese box, but never with the final assertion that the innermost box is empty. Instead, Olson reiterates, he clung in the end to hope, which at times was for him indistinguishable from faith. Part of this hope, Olson emphasizes, depended on his discovery of 'the Hegelian idea of the identity ofpure being and pure nothingness' (p. 4), which seems to have given support to his longing to overcome the dualities in his thought through the affirmationof the identity of opposites. This is an aspiration that reappears in later Hispanic writers,notably Cortazar and Paz, both of whom seem to share Unamuno's perpetual desire to escape from an 'either . . . or' to a 'both . . . and'. But, while we can sympathize with the spiritual dilemmas ofall three writers,we cannot overlook the factthat to postulate the identity of opposites leads directly to advocating mystiques?Unamuno's 'inmortalidad de bulto', Cortazar's 'Yonder', Paz's 'otra orilla'?which raise more problems than the faith they are intended to replace. Olson's suggestion of a chiasmus-like pattern in the development of Unamuno's fic? tion is original and thought-provoking, but in my view his discussion of Unamuno's persistent habit of cultivating contradiction could have been more critical. University of Virginia Donald L. Shaw Womenof the Prologue: Imitation, Myth, and Magic in 'Don Quixote I'. By Carolyn A. Nadeau. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated Uni? versity Presses. 2002. 188 pp. ?30. ISBN 0-83875-510-0. The portrayal of women in Cervantes has been the object of study of a number of books, but Carolyn N. Nadeau offersa new insight into this subject by focusing on the women mentioned in the prologue to Don Quixote I. Nadeau argues that, in the same way that the prologue raises many literary questions, Cervantes's treatment of women suggests new approaches and attitudes: 'Cervantes's masterpiece heralds a new vision for both writing practices and women's role in society' (p. 138). The aims of the book are clearly set out in the introduction, and clarity of argument is mantained throughout the text. Nadeau's style is rigorous, and, at the same time, transparent and easy to read, qualities that, in these times of postmodernist literary criticism, are most appreciated. The argument is very tightly structured, presenting carefully ordered ideas. This is one of the strengths in the book that, however, on some occasions becomes a weakness, as it seems that the argument is forced into a predetermined structure, so that the concepts are sometimes oversimplified. In Chapters 1 and 2, Nadeau sets out the basis of her discussion, explaining the choice of topic and the interesting combination of theory of imitation and its appli? cation to the portrayal of women, beginning with the female figures in the prologue MLRy ioo.i, 2005 239 of Don Quixote I. Nadeau provides references from a wide range of critics, but she is sometimes too ambitious, and the references are often too brief to permit an in-depth discussion. In some instances the references are not made completely relevant, as they are left unexplored: this is the case with...

Spatial S-R compatibility effects in an intentional imitation task

The active intermodal mapping hypothesis suggests that intentional imitation is mediated by a highly efficient, special-purpose mechanism of actor-centered movement encoding. In the present study, using methods from stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility research, we found no evidence to support this hypothesis. In two experiments, the performance of adult participants instructed to imitate actor-centered spatial properties of head, arm, and leg movements was affected by task-irrelevant, egocentric spatial cues. In Experiment 1, participants imitated using the same side of their bodies as did the model, and performance was less accurate when egocentric stimulus location was response incompatible than when it was response compatible. This effect was reversed in Experiment 2 when participants imitated using the opposite side of their bodies. These findings, in line with general process theories of imitation, imply that intentional imitation is mediated by the same processes that mediate responding to inanimate stimuli on the basis of arbitrary S-R mappings.

Topological imitation of a colored link with the same Dehn surgery manifold

By the topological imitation theory, we construct, from a given colored link, a new colored link with the same Dehn surgery manifold. In particular, we construct a link with a distinguished coloring whose Dehn surgery manifold is a given closed connected oriented 3-manifold except the 3-sphere. As a result, we can naturally generalize the difference between the Gordon–Luecke theorem and the property P conjecture to a difference between a link version of the Gordon–Luecke theorem and the Poincaré conjecture. Similarly, we construct a link with a π 1 -distinguished coloring whose Dehn surgery manifold is a given non-simply-connected closed connected oriented 3-manifold. We also construct a link with just two colorings whose Dehn surgery manifolds are the 3-sphere.

Towards interactive robots in autism therapy

This article discusses the potential of using interactive environments in autism therapy. We specifically address issues relevant to the Aurora project, which studies the possible role of autonomous, mobile robots as therapeutic tools for children with autism. Theories of mindreading, social cognition and imitation that informed the Aurora project are discussed and their relevance to the project is outlined. Our approach is put in the broader context of socially intelligent agents and interactive environments. We summarise results from trials with a particular mobile robot. Finally, we draw some comparisons to research on interactive virtual environments in the context of autism therapy and education. We conclude by discussing future directions and open issues.