This article presents a biologically inspired model for motor skills imitation. The model is composed of modules whose functinalities are inspired by corresponding brain regions responsible for the control of movement in primates. These modules are high-level abstractions of the spinal cord, the primary and premotor cortexes (M1 and PM), the cerebellum, and the temporal cortex. Each module is modeled at a connectionist level. Neurons in PM respond both to visual observation of movements and to corresponding motor commands produced by the cerebellum. As such, they give an abstract representation of mirror neurons. Learning of new combinations of movements is done in PM and in the cerebellum. Premotor cortexes and cerebellum are modeled by the DRAMA neural architecture which allows learning of times series and of spatio-temporal invariance in multimodal inputs. The model is implemented in a mechanical simulation of two humanoid avatars, the imitator and the imitatee. Three types of sequences learning are presented: (1) learning of repetitive patterns of arm and leg movements; (2) learning of oscillatory movements of shoulders and elbows, using video data of a human demonstration; 3) learning of precise movements of the extremities for grasp and reach

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Abstract: It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing ’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating children’s understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective-shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions. By all appearances, the cognitive skills of human beings are very different from those of other animal species, including our nearest primate relatives. Human

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Abstract. A laboratory experiment was conducted in order to explore the possibility of imitation, that is, response learning by observation, in marmosets, Callithrix jacchus. Inexperienced individuals were allowed to observe a skilful model that demonstrated one of two possible techniques (pushing or pulling a pendulum-door) to get food from inside a wooden box. Their initial manipulative actions, performed when exposed to the box in a subsequent test, were compared with those of naive control subjects (non-observers). The observers showed less exploratory behaviour than the non-observers and, more importantly, some showed a strong tendency to use the demonstrated opening technique in the initial test phase. This initial preference disappeared in the course of five test sessions and the observers converged towards the simpler, alternative solution that was generally preferred by the non-observers. Despite fundamental individual differences in the observer group and the failure to find a significant group effect, the results indicate that marmosets are capable of learning simple motor skills through conspecific observation. � 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour The basic tenet of the social (‘Machiavellian’) intelligence hypothesis is that, although most

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une s'equence motrice et de son timing pr'ecis. Un autre int'eret de ce travail est que le r'eseau de neurones utilis'e pour l'apprentissage des s'equences est directement inspir'e d'une structure c'er'ebrale, l'hippocampe, principalement impliqu'ee dans les processus de m'emoire. Nous discutons l'importance des processus d'imitation pour la compr 'ehension de nos capacit'es cognitives de "haut niveau" li'ees `a la reconnaissance de soi et `a la reconnaissance des autres comme quelque chose de similaire `a soi. Mots cl'es: imitation, apprentissage de s'equences temporelles, neuro-cybern'etique 1 Introduction Depuis plus d'une quarantaine d'ann'ees maintenant, les chercheurs en Intelligence Artificielle (IA) et en robotique essaient de cr'eer des syst`emes capables d'apprendre par eux meme. Le bilan de ces travaux est tr`es contrast'e. Un grand nombre d'algorithmes d'optimisation ont vu le jour. Dans la plupart des cas, en robotique, apprendre `a r'esoudre un probl`e

Theories of language evolution typically attribute its unique structure to pressures acting on the genetic transmission of a language faculty and on the cultural transmission of language itself. In strongly biological accounts, natural selection acting on the genetic transmission of the language faculty is seen as the key determinant of linguistic structure, with culture relegated to a relatively minor role. Strongly cultural accounts place greater emphasis on the role of learning in shaping language, with little or no biological adaptation. Formal modelling of the transmission of language, using mathematical or computational techniques, allows rigorous study of the impact of these two modes of transmission on the structure of language. In this thesis, computational models are used to investigate the evolution of symbolic vocabulary and compositional structure. To what extent can these aspects of language be explained in terms of purely biological or cultural evolution? Should we expect to see a fruitful interaction between these two adaptive processes in a dual transmission model?

& Learning by imitation can provide agents with a natural and effective means for transferring knowledge when brain-to-brain connection is infeasible. Natural mechanisms for imitation demonstrate strong abstraction and conceptualization capabilities, however, computational models that have been proposed for imitative learning barely address these fundamental features. Inspired by functions of human brain constituents and exploiting ideas enthused by mirror neurons and the multi-store model of memory, we propose a new model for learning by imitation capable of developing relational concepts. In our model, memory gradually organizes sensory data into concepts through reinforcement learning and consolidation, while mirror neurons maintain an extendible repertoire of familiar actions connected to corresponding concepts. We also discuss the relation between modeling behavior of concept-oriented agents in terms of mathematical functions and relevant biological evidence of mirror neurons. Eventually, we evaluate our method in a phoneme acquisition experiment through real interaction with humans. Humans and social animals acquire some parts of their knowledge through interaction with other members of their societies. Such social learning processes may have different forms. When an agent (human, animal, or even machine) tries to learn a task by observing how others do it, the process is called ‘‘imitation.’ ’ Although there is still debate on the exact definition of imitation (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Tomasello 1990), most researchers agree that it is different from mimicking. While mimicking is merely involved in recording and reproducing observed actions, imitation needs some sort of abstraction and understanding of observations (Arbib 2000; Breazeal and Scassellati 2000). Learning by imitation is appealing to the engineering community, particularly