Various deficits in the cognitive functioning of people with autism have been documented in recent years but these provide only partial explanations for the condition. We focus instead on an imitative disturbance involving difficulties both in copying actions and in inhibiting more stereotyped mimicking, such as echolalia. A candidate for the neural basis of this disturbance may be found in a r...

Having the computer imitate recorded human actions is the basis for an experimental technology for programming, variously called "Programming by Example" or "Programming by Demonstration". This is an under-appreciated technology that holds the promise of revolutionizing programming and making it more accessible, especially to non-expert programmers. Because imitation is a natural learning strat...

Several recent studies showed the effect of eye gaze direction on both instructed and spontaneous imitative behavior, as well as the acquisition of action-effect binding. In particular, direct eye gaze of a model gesturer/talker, compared to averted eye gaze, gives rise to faster gesture imitation and better vocal imitation, and reinforces intersubjective stimulus-effect learning. In an experim...

Learning by imitation allows humans to easily transfer motor knowledge between individuals. Our research is aimed towards equipping robots with imitative capabilities, so humans can simply show a robot what to do. This will greatly simplify how humans program robots. To achieve imitative behaviour, we have implemented a selforganizing connectionist modular architecture on a simulated robot. Mot...

A mathematical model for behavioral changes by pair interactions (i.e. due to direct contact) of individuals is developed. Three kinds of pair interactions can be distinguished: Imitative processes, avoidance processes, and compromising processes. Representative solutions of the model for two different interacting subpopulations are illustrated by computational results. The equations of game th...

This paper presents an endogenous growth model in which some firms devote resources to developing higher quality products (innovative R&D) and other firms devote resources to copying these products (imitative R&D). Although consumers benefit from the knowledge created by both types of R&D activities, only innovative R&D subsidies lead to faster economic growth and imitative R&D subsidies actual...

Mirror neurons (MNs) were first discovered in monkeys and subsequently in humans and birds. While MNs are deemed to play a number of high level cognitive functions, here we propose that they serve a unitary form of sensorimotor recognition of others’ behavior. We caution that this basic function should not be confounded with the higher order functions that stem from the wider cortical systems i...

The promotion of cooperation on spatial lattices is an important issue in evolutionary game theory. This effect clearly depends on the update rule: it diminishes with stochastic imitative rules whereas it increases with unconditional imitation. To study the transition between both regimes, we propose a new evolutionary rule, which stochastically combines unconditional imitation with another imi...

As is the case for human speech, birdsong is transmitted across generations by imitative learning. Although transfer of song patterns from adults to juveniles typically occurs via vertical or oblique transmission, there is also evidence of horizontal transmission between juveniles of the same generation. Here, we show that a young male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) that has been exposed to ...

Historically, a lot of authors in psychology and in robotics tend to separate “true imitation” and its related high-level mechanisms which seem to be exclusive to human adult, from low-level imitations or “mimicries” observed on babies or primates. Closely, classical researches suppose that an imitative artificial system must be able to build a model of the demonstrator’s geometry, in order to ...