Background: Impaired temporal stability and poor motor unit recruitment are key impairments in Parkinsonian motor control during a whole spectrum of rhythmic movements, from simple finger tapping to gait. Therapies based on imitation can be designed for patients with motor impairments and virtual-reality (VR) offers a new perspective. Motor actions are known to depend upon the dopaminergic syst...

In this paper, I would like to emphasize the developmental role of imitation as a foundation for the emergence of a sense of agency (i.e. a sense of being the owner of one’s own action). There is a large body of psychological and neuroimaging experiments that have demonstrated that perception of action share some common neural and cognitive mechanisms with action generation, action simulation, ...

BACKGROUND Neonates reproduce facial movements in response to an adult model just after birth. This neonatal oral imitation usually disappears at about 2- to 3-months of age following the development of cortical control. There is controversy relating to the nature and neural basis of such neonatal imitation. To address this issue, we studied the relationship between oral imitation, primitive re...

Children’s imitation is a profoundly social process. Although previous developmental accounts of imitation have focused on imitation as a way to learn from others, the current article stresses that imitation goes far beyond this: It is often intimately tied to children’s need to belong to the group and their drive to affiliate with those around them. Accordingly, imitation is chiefly determined...

There are currently two major approaches to robot teaching: explicitly tell the robot what to do (programming) or let the robot gure it out for itself (reinforcement learning/genetic algorithms). In this paper we give an overview of a new approach, in which the robot instead learns novel behaviours by observing the behaviour of others: imitation learning. We summarize the psychological backgrou...

The influence of changes in context and object characteristics on deferred imitation was assessed in 14-month-old infants. In Experiment 1, infants in the imitation group saw an adult demonstrate target acts on miniature objects in an unusual context (an orange polka-dot tent). When later presented with larger objects in a normal laboratory room, these infants performed significantly more targe...

Past attempts to identify the neural substrates of hand and finger imitation skills in the left hemisphere of the brain have yielded inconsistent results. Here, we analyse those associations in a large sample of 257 left hemisphere stroke patients. By introducing novel Bayesian methods, we characterise lesion symptom associations at three levels: the voxel-level, the single-region level (using ...

Cumulative culture ostensibly arises from a set of sociocognitive processes which includes high-fidelity production imitation, prosociality and group identification. The latter processes are facilitated by unconscious imitation or social mimicry. The proximate mechanisms of individual variation in imitation may thus shed light on the evolutionary history of the human capacity for cumulative cul...

Imitation is a complex process that includes higher-order cognitive and motor function. This process requires an observation-execution matching system that transforms an observed action into an identical movement. Although the low-gamma band is thought to reflect higher cognitive processes, no studies have focused on it. Here, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine the neural oscillato...