Imitation has been hailed as 'social glue', facilitating rapport with others. Previous studies suggest that social cues modulate imitation but the mechanism of such modulation remains underspecified. Here we examine the locus, specificity, and neural basis of the social control of imitation. Social cues (group membership and eye gaze) were manipulated during an imitation task in which imitative...

Humans are faster to perform a given action following observation of that same action. Converging evidence suggests that the human mirror neuron system (MNS) plays an important role in this phenomenon. However, the specificity of the neural mechanisms governing this effect remain controversial. Specialist theories of imitation suggest that biological cues are maximally capable of eliciting imit...

In the last decade, stochastic models have shown to be very useful for quantitative modelling of social processes. Here, a configurational master equation for the description of behavioral changes by pair interactions of individuals is developed. Three kinds of social pair interactions are distinguished: Avoidance processes, compromising processes, and imitative processes. Computational results...

Speech communication can be viewed as an interactive process involving a functional coupling between sensory and motor systems. One striking example comes from phonetic convergence, when speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor’s speech during communicative interaction. In order to test whether deaf people with cochlear implantation did recover such perceptuomotor abilities, we m...

In a study of how the concept of affordances could be applied to interaction behaviour, we introduce the notion of “interpersonal maps”, a geometrical representation of the relationships between a set of proprioceptive and heteroceptive information sources, thus creating a common representation space for comparing one’s own behaviour and the behaviour of others. Such maps can be used to detect ...

The recent literature on language intervention has become increasingly focused upon developing treatments that more closely parallel normal language acquisition. However, there have been relatively few reports that directly compare imitative procedures to conversational-interactive interventions. The purpose of the present study was to compare the relative effectiveness of imitative interventio...

In this paper, three models, cluster, value network and business ecosystem, are assessed and their key features are compared. Conservative, imitative and absorptive innovation strategies are defined and their suitability to these three models is analyzed.