Beyond Mirror Neurons by Burton Howard;

Author:Burton, Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Neuroscience, Psychology, Language
Publisher: Open Agenda Publishing
Published: 2020-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Questions for Discussion:

What does Howard mean, exactly, when he says, “But that’s just tautological”?

Do children learn language differently than adults? If so, how much of that difference do you think is related to their use of imitation?

V. Seeking a Controller

Structural investigations

HB: OK, let me try to summarize your argument with respect to this question of imitation. Tell me if I’ve understood it correctly.

Imitation is an essential tool, an essential aspect, perhaps an essential by-product, of many of these learning processes that we have. But by ascribing to it the status of a driving force, or to be saying that at some level it’s necessarily an end in itself, we’re making the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causality.

Imitation may be an essential part of the learning process, it may even be a necessary by-product, to the extent that for humans, whenever there is learning going on, there is going to be some level of imitation involved.

But that doesn’t necessarily imply that whenever you have imitation you’re going to have learning; and therefore what we really need to focus on is the underlying structure to which this imitation is associated.

Is that a reasonable summary?

GH: Yes. Cecilia Heyes has pointed out that the mechanism for imitation is very simple: it’s just an associative mechanism. You take some stimulus, some action, and you map it on to a motor program that can regenerate that. It’s not a complicated thing. It exists in macaques. They have this fundamental ability in terms of the neural circuits, but they don’t seem to take advantage of it.

Given that it’s a simple mechanism, the question is, How do you ramp it up to be really useful for you? That comes down to the kinds of systems that can put it into play. It’s telling that imitation as it exists in humans is very smart. Some of the work in kids suggests that they will imitate quite readily, but they know what to imitate.

If you try to demonstrate the operation of a novel toy, but you keep failing, the kid won’t imitate the failure. That would be a direct imitation, a stupid imitation. They see what you’re trying to do, make inferences about what the goals are, and then they imitate the successful way of doing it, even if they wouldn’t have been able to know how to do it before.

HB: Right. So this is my sense of it being a tool. There has to be some meta-structure underneath, or over, or whatever.

GH: Yes, there has to be something driving it. Even in overt, unconscious imitation, which humans do—the leg-crossing copying stuff, which is called the chameleon effect—even that is smart. You can set up experiments where you put people in situations and have a model crossing her legs or scratching her head and people will tend to copy that unconsciously. But we don’t do it willy-nilly. We tend to copy only people we want to identify with. If there’s someone we don’t like, we don’t copy them.

So in that case there’s something social behind the tendency even to unconsciously imitate.

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