Aicken Michael D, Wilson Andrew D, Williams Justin H G, Mon-Williams Mark
College of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland, UK.
Brain Cogn. 2007 Apr;63(3):304-8. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2006.09.005. Epub 2006 Oct 27.
Ideomotor (IM) theory suggests that observing someone else perform an action activates an internal motor representation of that behaviour within the observer. Evidence supporting the case for an ideomotor theory of imitation has come from studies that show imitative responses to be faster than the same behavioural measures performed in response to spatial cues. In an attempt to replicate these findings, we manipulated the salience of the visual cue and found that we could reverse the advantage of the imitative cue over the spatial cue. We suggest that participants utilised a simple visuomotor mechanism to perform all aspects of this task, with performance being driven by the relative visual salience of the stimuli. Imitation is a more complex motor skill that would constitute an inefficient strategy for rapid performance.
观念运动（IM）理论认为，观察他人执行某个动作会激活观察者体内该行为的运动表象。支持模仿的观念运动理论的证据来自一些研究，这些研究表明模仿反应比针对空间线索做出的相同行为测量更快。为了复制这些发现，我们操纵了视觉线索的显著性，结果发现我们可以逆转模仿线索相对于空间线索的优势。我们认为，参与者利用一种简单的视觉运动机制来执行这项任务的所有方面，其表现是由刺激的相对视觉显著性驱动的。模仿是一种更复杂的运动技能，对于快速执行任务来说，它将是一种低效的策略。
