Part II - Mirroring and ‘mind-reading’

Summary

Mirrors, mirror neurons and mirroring the behaviour of others all clearly relate to different types of matching. Could mirror-like mechanisms allow us to understand and to generate imitative behaviour? If so, how?

The phrase, ‘Monkey see, monkey do’ is still being used in public terms to dismiss any behaviour where an animal copies or mirrors what another animal is doing, despite the fact that the research fields of social learning and imitation in humans, animals and, more recently, robotics, have been flourishing, providing rich evidence for the importance of imitation and social learning in social development, skills learning, culture, etc. Similarly, in computer science and robotics the term ‘imitation’ can be misunderstood easily as simply copying computer programmes e.g. from one machine/robot to another. However, imitation in biological systems is not realized as copying ‘behaviour programmes’ from one animal to another: even in the hypothetical situation that brain waves could be directly transmitted and exchanged between, for example, humans, they would still have to be perceived and interpreted, they could not be ‘loaded’ directly into the neural structure of another organism, very different from a particular piece of software where numerous copies can be produced and installed on various computers. Metaphors borrowed from computer science often fail in the realm of biological systems, and ‘copying’ or ‘imitation’ is a good example.