•We offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature on over-imitation.•We discuss methodological issues affecting the behavior in experiments.•Different theoretical perspectives are ...contrasted and critically assessed.•Over-imitation is a contextually flexible and normally functional phenomenon.
After seeing an action sequence children and adults tend to copy causally relevant and, more strikingly, even perceivably unnecessary actions in relation to the given goal. This phenomenon, termed “over-imitation”, has inspired much empirical research in the past decade as well as lively theoretical debate on its cognitive underpinnings and putative role in the transmission of cultural knowledge. Here, we offer a comprehensive review of the existing literature to date, accompanied by a table including concise information on 54 published studies testing over-imitation in different species, age groups and cultures. We highlight methodological issues related to task and context that influence over-imitation rates and that should be carefully considered in study designs. We discuss the cognitive and motivational processes underlying and contributing to over-imitation, including normative action parsing, causal reasoning, motives of affiliation and social learning as well as their complex interplay. We conclude that despite the apparent irrationality of over-imitation behavior, recent studies have shown that its performance depends on the specific task, modeled actions and context variables, suggesting that over-imitation should be conceptualized as a contextually flexible and, in fact, a normally highly functional phenomenon.
Children have a proclivity to learn through faithful imitation, but the extent to which this applies under significant cost remains unclear. To address this, we investigated whether 4‐ to 6‐year‐old ...children (N = 97) would stop imitating to forego a desirable food reward. We presented participants with a task involving arranging marshmallows and craft sticks, with the goal being either to collect marshmallows or build a tower. Children replicated the demonstrated actions with high fidelity regardless of the goal, but retrieved rewards differently. Children either copied the specific actions needed to build a tower, prioritizing tower completion over reward; or adopted a novel convention of stacking materials before collecting marshmallows, and developed their own method to achieve better outcomes. These results suggest children's social learning decisions are flexible and context‐dependent, yet that when framed by an ostensive goal, children imitated in adherence to the goal despite incurring significant material costs.
Research Summary
We study the performance implications of dynamic environments for a leader's rivalry‐based imitation efforts in a setting with multiple rivals. We disentangle competitive ...interactions from environmental changes to show that a leader's simple rules to either imitate the closest rival in terms of attributes (her neighbor) or the closest rival in terms of rank (her challenger) can help to maintain the performance gap to her competitors. Using a computational model and an empirical test, we find that environmental changes alter the trade‐offs between imitation accuracy and the responsiveness to threats from distant rivals. Consequently, when environmental changes are infrequent and minor, neighbor imitation is more effective in maintaining the lead, whereas challenger imitation prevails as environmental changes become more frequent and substantial.
Managerial Summary
By showing that imitating a lower‐ranked rival can help a leader to stay ahead, recent research has overturned the common thinking that imitation is only useful for those trying to catch up with the leader. However, these insights come from contexts in which the leader has only one competitor. Can imitation also be effective for a leader competing against multiple rivals, and whom should the leader imitate? We find that imitation can indeed help the leader to maintain their lead against multiple rivals, but that the choice of imitation target matters and should take the competitive environment into account. In relatively stable environments, imitating your most similar rival works best, while imitating whoever is in second place is a more effective approach in changeable environments.
Automatic Imitation: A Meta-Analysis Cracco, Emiel; Bardi, Lara; Desmet, Charlotte ...
Psychological bulletin,
05/2018, Volume:
144, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Automatic imitation is the finding that movement execution is facilitated by compatible and impeded by incompatible observed movements. In the past 15 years, automatic imitation has been studied to ...understand the relation between perception and action in social interaction. Although research on this topic started in cognitive science, interest quickly spread to related disciplines such as social psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience. However, important theoretical questions have remained unanswered. Therefore, in the present meta-analysis, we evaluated seven key questions on automatic imitation. The results, based on 161 studies containing 226 experiments, revealed an overall effect size of gz = 0.95, 95% CI 0.88, 1.02. Moderator analyses identified automatic imitation as a flexible, largely automatic process that is driven by movement and effector compatibility, but is also influenced by spatial compatibility. Automatic imitation was found to be stronger for forced choice tasks than for simple response tasks, for human agents than for nonhuman agents, and for goalless actions than for goal-directed actions. However, it was not modulated by more subtle factors such as animacy beliefs, motion profiles, or visual perspective. Finally, there was no evidence for a relation between automatic imitation and either empathy or autism. Among other things, these findings point toward actor-imitator similarity as a crucial modulator of automatic imitation and challenge the view that imitative tendencies are an indicator of social functioning. The current meta-analysis has important theoretical implications and sheds light on longstanding controversies in the literature on automatic imitation and related domains.
Public Significance Statement
The current meta-analysis indicates that automatic imitation is a flexible, automatic process that depends on how similar the actor is to the imitator. In contrast to popular belief, we found no support for the hypothesis that automatic imitation is an indicator of social functioning, which was studied in the form of empathy and autism spectrum disorder. These results have important implications for our understanding of perception and action in the context of social interaction.
As an important breakthrough in coordinating economic, social, and ecological benefits, green innovation has received wide attention from governments, firms, and the public. However, existing studies ...mainly explored the economic factors influencing firms' green innovation while neglecting social factors. This study took common institutional ownership as the research perspective to explore whether firms' green innovation decisions are affected by their peers. Using a sample of Chinese A‐share listed firms from 2003 to 2019, this paper found that firms imitate their peers' green innovation in common institutional ownership networks and exhibit green innovation peer effects. Mechanism testing revealed that “voting with hands” through common institutional ownership helps firms obtain green innovation information (information‐based imitation), while “voting with feet” through common institutional ownership helps firms maintain a competitive awareness of green innovation (rivalry‐based imitation), thereby contributing to green innovation peer effects in common institutional ownership networks. Heterogeneity analysis showed that firms with greater financing constraints and lower levels of risk‐taking are more likely to imitate their peers' green innovation. Moreover, firms only regard peers with similar industry status and identical property rights as imitation targets in common institutional ownership networks, thereby following “the imitation law of closer preference.” An analysis of economic consequences revealed that green innovation peer effects in common institutional ownership networks are not strategic behaviors of “quantity over quality,” with imitation contributing to improving firm value. This paper enriches existing research on the influencing factors of green innovation and provides a new reference for promoting sustainable development.
Vocal imitation plays a critical function in the development and use of both language and music. Previous studies have reported more accurate imitation for sung pitch than spoken pitch, which might ...be attributed to the structural differences in acoustic signals and/or the distinct mental representations of pitch patterns across speech and music. The current study investigates the interaction between bottom-up (i.e., acoustic structure) and top-down (i.e., participants' language and musical background) factors on pitch imitation by comparing speech and song imitation accuracy across four groups: English and Mandarin speakers with or without musical training. Participants imitated pitch sequences that were characteristic of either song or speech, derived from pitch patterns in English and Mandarin spoken sentences. Overall, song imitation was more accurate than speech imitation, and this advantage was larger for English than Mandarin pitch sequences, regardless of participants' musical and language experiences. This effect likely reflects the perceptual salience of linguistic tones in Mandarin relative to English speech. Music and language knowledge were associated with optimal imitation of different acoustic features. Musicians were more accurate in matching absolute pitch across syllables and musical notes compared to nonmusicians. By contrast, Mandarin speakers were more accurate at imitating fine-grained changes within and across pitch events compared to English speakers. These results suggest that different top-down factors (i.e., language and musical background) influence pitch imitation ability for different dimensions of bottom-up features (i.e., absolute pitch and relative pitch patterns).
Public Significance StatementResults of this study revealed that pitch imitation ability is influenced by one's language and musical background as well as the characteristics of acoustic stimuli. Musical training may improve the ability to match absolute pitch whereas experience with a tone language may enhance the ability to imitate relative pitch.
This book challenges the widespread view of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic and predominantly religious position on mimesis.Taking mimesis as a crucial conceptual point of reference in reading ...Kierkegaard, this book offers a nuanced understanding of the relation between aesthetics and religion in his thought. Kaftanski shows how Kierkegaard's dialectical-existential reading of mimesis interlaces aesthetic and religious themes, including the familiar core concepts of imitation, repetition, and admiration as well as the newly arisen notions of affectivity, contagion, and crowd behavior. Kierkegaard’s enduring relevance to the malaises of our own day is firmly established by his classic concern for the meaning of human life informed by reflective meditation on the mimeticorigins of the contemporary age.Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy, the history of aesthetics, and critical and religious studies.
A groundbreaking appreciation of Dylan as a literary practitioner
WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if ...baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet: Imitation and Originality in the Songs of Bob Dylan places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition.
In lucid prose, Raphael Falco demonstrates the similarity between what Renaissance writers called imitatio and the way Dylan borrows, digests, and transforms traditional songs. Although Dylan’s lyrical postures might suggest a post-Romantic, “avant-garde” consciousness, No One to Meet shows that Dylan’s creative process borrows from and creatively expands the methods used by classical and Renaissance authors.
Drawing on numerous examples, including Dylan’s previously unseen manuscript excerpts and archival materials, Raphael Falco illuminates how the ancient process of poetic imitation, handed down from Greco-Roman antiquity, allows us to make sense of Dylan’s musical and lyrical technique. By placing Dylan firmly in the context of an age-old poetic practice, No One to Meet deepens our appreciation of Dylan’s songs and allows us to celebrate him as what he truly is: a great writer.
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