Individuals with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation skills. This article reviews the importance of imitation in typical development, focusing on the social function of imitation and its role in the development of social communication skills. Second, it reviews evidence suggesting an association between imitation deficits and social communication impairments in children with autism...

Individuals with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation skills. This paper will review the importance of imitation in typical development, focusing on the social function of imitation and its role in the development of social-communication skills. Second, it will review evidence suggesting an association between imitation deficits and social-communication impairments in children with ...

Introduction 2 Humans as the Imitative Animal 2 Conceptual Distinctions: Distinguishing Imitation From Other Forms of Social Learning 2 Explaining Human Imitation 3 The Binding Problem 3 Learning to Imitate by Operant Conditioning 3 Learning to Imitate by Associative Learning 3 Piaget’s Theory of Imitative Development 4 Imitation of Facial Acts 4 Active Intermodal Mapping Theory 5 Neural Mirror...

systematization. To the degree that gestures could be made up “on the fly” there would be little evolutionary advantage supporting systematiziation. Darwin (1877) thought it unlikely that a system such as language could have emerged directly from gesture. He believed that this would require the shifting of a function from one organ to another and then back again, as if flying had moved from the...