Highlights•Imitation is a social act, promoting parent–infant affiliation.•Culture is transmitted
across generations via imitation.•Infants can imitate from memory and regulate their …

What, if anything, is special about human imitation? An evaluation of enculturated apes'
imitation skills, a “best case scenario” of non-human apes' imitation performance, reveals …

Despite the ubiquity of touchscreen applications and television programs for young children,
developmental research suggests that learning in this context is degraded relative to face-to …

Children learn about the social and physical world by observing other people's acts. This
experiment tests both Chinese and American children's learning of a rule. For theoretical …

Deferred imitation (DI) may be regarded as an early declarative-like memory ability sha**
the infant's ability to learn about novelties and regularities of the surrounding world. In the …

Children use imitation flexibly to acquire the instrumental skills and conventions of their
social groups. This study (N= 69 parent and 3-to 6-year-old child dyads) examined the …

Sequence learning underlies many uniquely human behaviours, from complex tool use to
language and ritual. To understand whether this fundamental cognitive feature is uniquely …

During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate
change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant …

Children are exceptional, even 'super,'imitators but comparatively poor independent
problem-solvers or innovators. Yet, imitation and innovation are both necessary components …

Humans excel at mirroring both others' actions (imitation) as well as others' goals and
intentions (emulation). As most research has focused on imitation, here we focus on how …