Heyes Cecilia
All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2016 Jan 19;371(1686):20150069. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0069.
Many comparative and developmental psychologists believe that we are Homo imitans; humans are more skilled and prolific imitators than other animals, because we have a special, inborn 'intermodal matching' mechanism that integrates representations of others with representations of the self. In contrast, the associative sequence learning (ASL) model suggests that human infants learn to imitate using mechanisms that they share with other animals, and the rich resources provided by their sociocultural environments. This article answers seven objections to the ASL model: (i) it presents evidence that newborns do not imitate; (ii) argues that infants receive a plentiful supply of the kind of experience necessary for learning to imitate; (iii) suggests that neither infants nor adults can imitate elementally novel actions; (iv) explains why non-human animals have a limited capacity for imitation; (v) discusses the goal-directedness of imitation; (vi) presents evidence that improvement in imitation depends on visual feedback; and (vii) reflects on the view that associative theories steal 'the soul of imitation'. The empirical success of the ASL model indicates that the mechanisms which make imitation possible, by aligning representations of self with representations of others, have been tweaked by cultural evolution, not built from scratch by genetic evolution.
许多比较心理学家和发展心理学家认为，我们是模仿者；人类是比其他动物更熟练、更多产的模仿者，因为我们有一种特殊的、与生俱来的“跨通道匹配”机制，这种机制将他人的表征与自我的表征整合在一起。相比之下，联想序列学习（ASL）模型表明，人类婴儿是利用他们与其他动物共有的机制以及社会文化环境提供的丰富资源来学习模仿的。本文回应了对ASL模型的七点质疑：（i）它提出证据表明新生儿不会模仿；（ii）认为婴儿获得了学习模仿所需的丰富经验；（iii）表明婴儿和成人都无法模仿全新的动作；（iv）解释了为什么非人类动物的模仿能力有限；（v）讨论了模仿的目标导向性；（vi）提出证据表明模仿能力的提高依赖于视觉反馈；（vii）思考了联想理论窃取“模仿之魂”这一观点。ASL模型在实证方面的成功表明，通过将自我表征与他人表征对齐来实现模仿的机制是由文化进化微调的，而非由基因进化从零构建。
