Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals--论文代写范文精选

在这篇essay代写范文中，传达的是理念模仿作为一个主题，当前认知科学的兴趣和工作的重要性，对于社会科学和哲学,它尚未被同化。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Introduction
Imitation is often thought of as a low-level, cognitively undemanding, even childish form of behavior, but recent work across a variety of sciences argues that imitation is a rare ability that is fundamentally linked to characteristically human forms of intelligence, in particular to language, culture, and the ability to understand other minds. This burgeoning body of work has important implications for our understanding of ourselves, both individually and socially. Imitation is not just an important factor in human development, it also has a pervasive influence throughout adulthood in ways we are just starting to understand. These two volumes present papers by researchers working in disciplines that include neuroscience and brain imaging, psychology, animal behavior, philosophy, computer science, education studies, anthropology, media studies, economics, sociology, and law. 

Among the authors are many who are leading figures in imitation research and who have produced seminal work on imitation. They also include younger researchers and scholars commenting on work in disciplines other than their own. One of our main aims in these volumes has been to provide a resource that brings together important work on this topic from various disciplines, makes it accessible across disciplines, and fosters interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. In particular, we want to convey why imitation is a topic of such intense current interest in the cognitive sciences and how important this work is for the social sciences and for philosophy, where it has yet to be assimilated. This introduction surveys the central themes of the volumes, chapter by chapter, and then distills some of the important issues on which they bear, both methodological and substantive. En route, the following questions are addressed: 
Which actions count as imitation and which are better understood in other terms?
What is imitated—the goals of action or the movements that are the means to goals, or both? How is imitation achieved? By what neural mechanisms, in the contexts of what cognitive architectures or social environments? Who imitates—only human beings, or other animals? When does imitation occur—only in development, or also in adulthood? Why does imitation occur—what are its evolutionary and cultural functions? 

The structure of this introduction largely follows the structure of the two volumes. In volume 1, part I focuses on the subpersonal mechanisms by which imitation is achieved, and part II on imitation in animals. In volume 2, part I is on the role of imitation in human development and part II is on the role of imitation in human culture. This introduction concludes with a broad view of why imitation matters and highlights themes and questions that unite the two volumes.

Mechanisms of Imitation 
What exactly is imitation? Imitation may be presumed to require at least copying in a generic sense. The observer’s perception of the model’s behavior causes similar behavior in the observer, in some way such that the similarity between the model’s behavior and that of the observer plays a role, though not necessarily at a conscious level, in generating the observer’s behavior.1 More than that we will not try to say at the outset. As we will explain below, imitation needs to be distinguished from other forms of social learning that may look superficially similar, and there are different accounts, in part motivated by the aims of different disciplines, of what is distinctive about imitation. However, even the generic idea of copying perceived behavior poses a certain immediate problem, which thus provides a natural starting place. Imitation appears to require the solution to a difficult correspondence problem. How is the perceived action of another agent translated into similar performance by the observer? When I imitate your hand movements at least I can see my own hands, even though my visual perspective on the two actions is different; but when I imitate your facial gestures, I cannot see my own face. 

How is the perceptual-to-motor mapping achieved? Moreover, when an infant imitates an adult, the two have very different body structures and dynamics. What information and mechanisms are needed to solve this problem? Striking discoveries in neuroscience suggest a possible answer. Certain neurons appear to constitute a direct link between perception and action; their firing correlates with specific perceptions as well as specific actions. Some of these, canonical neurons, can be thought of as reflecting affordances (in Gibson’s sense, 1986); they fire when a certain type of action is performed, but are also triggered by perception of objects that afford such actions. Others, mirror neurons, fire when a certain type of action is performed, but also when another agent is observed performing the same type of action. That is, mirror neurons are sensitive both to others’ actions and to equivalent actions of one’s own. 

They can be very specifically tuned. For example, certain cells fire when a monkey sees an experimenter bring food to her own mouth with her own hand or when the monkey brings food to its own mouth (even in the dark, so that the monkey cannot see its hand). When mirror neurons were discovered by a group of scientists in Parma, Italy, it was tempting to suggest that they enable imitation by avoiding the correspondence problem. If the same neurons code for perceived action and matching performance, it may seem that no neural translation is needed. However, things are not quite that simple. Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti, one of the Parma group, addresses the relationship between the ability to understand another agent’s action and the ability to replicate it, both of which he holds are required for imitation. 

In his view, action understanding phylogenetically precedes imitation and is subserved by mirror systems, which are necessary but not sufficient for imitation. Indeed, imitation has not been demonstrated in the macaque monkeys in which mirror neurons were discovered (but see Voelkl & Huber 2000). Rizzolatti suggests that the motor resonance set up by mirror neurons makes action observation meaningful by linking it to the observer’s own potential actions. Mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys by single-cell recording. Evidence for human mirror systems includes brain imaging work, as well as demonstrations that observing another agent act primes the muscles the observer would need to do the same thing. Rizzolatti describes mirror neurons in the monkey frontal brain area F5 as part of a neural circuit, including also parietal area PF and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) visual area. In human beings, he suggests, a similar circuit constitutes a comparator system in which an intended imitative movement is controlled by reference to an observed target movement, enabling imitative learning. (Others have postulated similar control systems, although they differ on details; e.g., Rizzolatti locates the comparator site in PF, while Marco Iacoboni locates it in STS.) In monkeys, mirror neurons display high-level resonance; they code for the goals or ends of performed or observed actions. By contrast, in human beings, the mirror system displays both high-level resonance and low-level resonance; it extends to the specific movements that are the means to achieving goals. This difference between mirroring the ends of action and mirroring the means of action is important for Rizzolatti’s argument that action understanding precedes imitation. His view faces the objection that many animals to whom it would be implausible to attribute action understanding can nonetheless replicate movements. Consider response priming, by which observing a movement ‘‘primes’’ the same movement by the animal, independently of any understanding of the goal of the movement (as in the flocking of birds). In response to this objection Rizzolatti suggests that such low-level mirroring of movements could be present without high-level mirroring of goals, or vice versa. Action understanding requires high-level mirroring of goals, which is found in macaque monkeys. However, genuine imitative learning has not been found in these monkeys and would require the interplay of mirroring for both the ends and the means of action, which is found in human mirror systems (again see and cf. Voelkl & Huber 2000). Rizzolatti’s argument here finds an ally in the views of Michael Tomasello, who links the phylogenetically rare capacity for imitative learning to the flexible recombinant means and ends structure of intentional action: the ability to use a given movement for different ends and pursue a given end by a variety of means. 

Psychologist Paul Harris has suggested an experimental assessment of the extent to which mirror neurons subserve action understanding in monkeys.2 Monkey mirror neurons fire when a monkey reaches for an apple, or when it sees the experimenter reach for the apple. The same mirror neurons also fire when a monkey sees a screen come down in front of the apple, so that it is no longer visible, and then sees the experimenter’s hand reach behind the screen to where the apple is hidden. But they do not fire when the monkey first sees that there is no apple, and then the screen comes down and the monkey sees the experimenter’s hand reach behind 2. This was in a discussion at the Royaumont conference, 2002. 4 Susan Hurley and Nick Chater the screen in the same way. The mirror neurons, that is, appear to code for the goal of the action. Harris suggests a variant that would address how insightfully the monkey attributes goals to others. Suppose the monkey and experimenter look at a nut and see the screen come down in front of it. Then the experimenter leaves the room. The monkey is permitted to remove the nut. Now the experimenter returns and the monkey sees the experimenter reach behind the screen for the nut, which the monkey knows is no longer there. Will the monkey’s mirror neuron for reaching for the nut fire? If so, this would suggest that the monkey attributes the goal of reaching for the nut to the experimenter, who ‘‘doesn’t know’’ that the nut is no longer there. Or will it not fire, because the nut is not there? Does the mirror neuron, that is, code for the intended goal of the observed action, or merely its result?（essay代写)

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