This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...

Three experiments investigated the size and sources of age-related changes in visual imitation. In Experiment 1, young and older adults viewed sequences of quasi-random movements and then reproduced from memory what they had seen. As expected, older adults made more errors in imitation than their younger counterparts. However, older adults seemed to supplement their memory by exploiting an abst...

Recent neuroimaging studies have suggested that the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) is important for action observation and imitation. In order to further explore the role of IFG in action observation and imitation, we pooled data from seven functional magnetic resonance imaging studies involving observation and imitation of simple finger movements performed in our laboratory. For imitation we fou...

We review three areas of research and theory relating to the involvement of motor processing in action observation: behavioural studies on imitation learning, behavioural work on short-term visuomotor interactions, and related neurophysiological and neuroimaging work. A large number of behavioural studies now indicate bi-directional links between perception and action: visual processing can aut...

To plagiarise is surely the worst of sins for an author; a person who claims originality after copying the works of others is obviously a deceiver. But to live successfully in the world it is not necessary to be original and sinfulness only enters if originality is claimed falsely. In fact, imitation is one method by which the young develop; a child copies the behaviour of its parents, brothers...

Theorists and experimental researchers have long debated whether animals are able to imitate. A variety of definitions of imitation have been proposed to describe this complex form of social learning. Experimental research on imitation has often been hampered by either a too loose 'anthropomorphic' approach or by too narrow 'behaviourist' definitions. At present neither associative nor cognitiv...

There is a large body of evidence of apparently spontaneous mimicry in humans. This phenomenon has been described as "automatic imitation" and attributed to a mirror neuron system, but there is little direct evidence that it is involuntary rather than intentional. Cook et al. supplied the first such evidence in a unique strategic game design that gave all subjects a pecuniary incentive to avoid...

It has been found in vowel imitation studies that subjects' responses to steadystate isolated vowels from an acoustic continuum exhibit categorical tendencies: Some adjacent vowels are responded to more similarly than others, and the distribution of formant frequencies in the total set of responses is decidedly nonuniform. The present study investigated whether these tendencies originate in per...

Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative themselves by copying creators. We hypothesized that (1) societies increase their rate of cultural evolution by tempering the novelty-generating effects of creativi...