In animals, humans and robots, imitative behaviors are very useful for acting, learning and communicating. Implementing imitation in autonomous robots is still a challenge and one of the main problems is to make them choose when and who to imitate. We start from minimalist architectures, following a bottom-up approach, to progressively complete them. Based on imitation processes in nature, many...

OBJECTIVE To examine the preventive effect of Buyang Huanwu Decoction (BYHWD) on imitative restenosis after percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) in diet-induced atherosclerotic rabbits. METHODS Diet-induced atherosclerotic rabbits were randomly allocated into group 1 (n = 24, fed with BYHWD one week before and 4 weeks after the operation, 2 ml/kg per day, containing herbal dr...

Imitation is a highly complex cognitive process, involving vision, perception, representation, memory and motor control. The underlying mechanisms that give rise to imitative behavior have attracted a lot of attention in recent years and have been the subject of research in various disciplines, from neuroscience to animal behavior and human psychology. In particular, studies in monkeys and huma...

Dysfunctions of the human mirror neuron system have been postulated to underlie some deficits in autism spectrum disorders including poor imitative performance and impaired social skills. Using three reaction time experiments addressing mirror neuron system functions under simple and complex conditions, we examined 20 adult autism spectrum disorder participants and 20 healthy controls matched f...

Human beings are the most imitative creatures in the animal kingdom. Imitation has both cognitive and social aspects and is a powerful mechanism for learning about and from people. Imitation raises theoretical questions about perception-action coupling, memory, representation, social cognition, and social affinities toward others "like me." Childhood imitation is attracting attention both withi...

Imitation involves matching the visual representation of another's action onto the observer's own motor program for that action. However, there has been some debate regarding the extent to which imitation is "automatic"-that is, occurs without attention. Participants performed a perceptual load task in which images of finger movements were presented as distractors. Responses to target letter st...

Postural reactions can be influenced by concomitant tasks or different contexts and are modulated by a higher order motor control. Recent studies investigated postural changes determined by motor contagion induced by action observation (chameleon effect) showing that observing a model in postural disequilibrium induces an increase in healthy subjects' body sway. Parkinson's disease (PD) is asso...

A successful procedure for studying imitative behavior in non-humans is the bidirectional control procedure in which observers are exposed to a demonstrator that responds by moving a manipulandum in one of two different directions (e.g., left vs. right). Imitative learning is demonstrated when observers make the response in the direction that they observed it being made. This procedure controls...

Controlling neural representations of the self and other people is fundamental to social cognition. Brain imaging studies have implicated the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) in this ability, but causal evidence for its role is lacking. A debate is also ongoing regarding whether the control of, or switching between, self and other representations is a specialized or domain-general process:...

Imitation is crucial for social learning, and so it is important to identify what determines between-subject variability in imitation fidelity. This might help explain what makes some people, like those with social difficulties such as in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), significantly worse at performance on these tasks than others. A novel paradigm was developed to provide objective measures of...