Imitation: Neither instinct nor gadget, but a cultural starting point?

Source: Laboratories of Judith Danovitch and Nicholaus Noles—University of Louisville
One of the main challenges of infancy is to learn how to achieve one’s goals in the world, whether they are to pick up a toy or to express desires to another person, and one of the most powerful tools in this learning process is imitation. However, imitation is not always as simple as copying other people’s actions; it is also necessary to realize that goals and intentions guide behavior. The...

Instinct theory proposes that innate biological instincts, like animal behavioral patterns, primarily drive human behavior. These instincts are inborn, not learned, and are fundamental to decision-making and action. Just as animals rely on instincts for critical survival functions such as migration, nest building, and defense, humans are also believed to exhibit behaviors rooted in evolutionary needs. For example, the instinct to reproduce motivates sexual behavior, while territorial instincts...

Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...

The elicited imitation procedure was established to examine the development of recall memory in infancy and early childhood. This procedure has been widely used to establish a solid foundation of the nature of recall memory in infancy and early...

Here we demonstrate how our lab begins a HuES human embryonic stem cell line culture from a frozen...

Intubation-mediated intratracheal (IMIT) instillation of reagents is an excellent, noninvasive method for studying respiratory disease, as well as a method for instilling therapeutic reagents directly into the lung. It is a rapid and highly reproducible method which is suitable for preclinical...