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Updated: Jan 27, 2026

Investigating Social Cognition in Infants and Adults Using Dense Array Electroencephalography dEEG
Published on: June 27, 2011
Adults imitate to send a social signal
Sujatha Krishnan-Barman1, Antonia F de C Hamilton1
1Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
Humans frequently imitate each other's actions with high fidelity, and different reasons have been proposed for why they do so. Here we test the hypothesis that imitation can act as a social signal, with imitation occurring with greater fidelity when a participant is being watched. In a preregistered study, 30 pairs of naïve participants played an augmented-reality game involving moving blocks in space. We compared imitation fidelity between trials where the leader watched the followers' action, and trials where the leader did not watch. Followers imitated the trajectory height demonstrated by the leader, and critically, the strength of this correlation was greater in trials where the follower knew the leader was watching them. This suggests that followers spontaneously used imitation as a social signal in a nonverbal interaction task, supporting socio-communicative hypotheses of imitation.
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