Search results for "Imitative Behavior"
showing 10 items of 10 documents
Supporting Reporting: On the Positive Effects of Text- and Video-Based Awareness Material on Responsible Journalistic Suicide News Writing.
2016
Suicide is a global public health problem. Media impact on suicide is well confirmed and there are several recommendations on how media should and should not report on suicide to minimize the risk of copycat behavior. Those media guidelines have been developed to improve responsible reporting on suicide (RRS). Although such guidelines are used in several countries, we lack empirical evidence on their causal effect on actual journalistic news writing. We conducted an experiment with journalism students (N = 78) in Germany in which we tested whether exposure to awareness material promoting RRS influences news writing. As a supplement to the widely used text-based material, we tested the impac…
New behavioural trait adopted or rejected by observing heterospecific tutor fitness
2010
Animals can acquire behaviours from others, including heterospecifics, but should be discriminating in when and whom to copy. Successful individuals should be preferred as tutors, while adopting traits of poorly performing individuals should be actively avoided. Thus far it is unknown if such adaptive strategies are involved when individuals copy other species. Furthermore, rejection of traits based on tutor characteristics (negative bias) has not been shown in any non-human animal. Here we test whether a choice between two new, neutral behavioural alternatives—breeding-sites with alternative geometric symbols—is affected by observing the choice and fitness of a heterospecific tutor. A fiel…
Do equilibrium constraints modulate postural reaction when viewing imbalance?
2011
Abstract Action observation and action execution are tightly coupled on a neurophysiological and a behavioral level, such that visually perceiving an action can contaminate simultaneous and subsequent action execution. More specifically, observing a model in postural disequilibrium was shown to induce an increase in observers’ body sway. Here we reciprocally questioned the role of observers’ motor system in the contagion process by comparing participants’ body sway when watching displays of antero-posterior vs. lateral imbalance. Indeed, during upright standing, biomechanical constraints differ along the antero-posterior (A-P) and medio-lateral (M-L) axes; hence an impact of observers’ post…
Effects of modelling on children's pretend play.
1989
The effects of modelling on pretend play were studied in children between 2.6 and 3.6 years of age by examining changes both in the action and language-based expressions of pretending. Three modelled scenes were demonstrated with the same realistic toys used by the child in the pre-modelling phase. The results gave support to the idea of the effectiveness of modelling. The effects of the modelled scenes were clearest among children whose pre-modelling play consisted of object-centred actions including few of pretending. The post-modelling play of this subgroup showed better quality of action and language categories and integration measures. Among the decentred players no significant action …
Time processing in children with Tourette's syndrome.
2010
Background: Tourette syndrome (TS) is characterized by dysfunctional connectivity between prefrontal cortex and sub-cortical structures, and altered meso-cortical and/or meso-striatal dopamine release. Since time processing is also regulated by fronto-striatal circuits and modulated by dopaminergic transmission, we hypothesized that time processing is abnormal in TS. Methods: We compared time processing abilities between nine children with TS-only (i.e. without major psychiatric comorbidities) and 10 age-matched healthy children, employing a time reproduction task in which subjects actively reproduce different temporal intervals, and a time comparison task in which subjects judge whether a …
Mentally represented motor actions in normal aging: III. Electromyographic features of imagined arm movements.
2009
Abstract Motor imagery is a cognitive process during which subjects mentally simulate movements without actually performing them. Here, we investigated the temporal and electromyographic (EMG) features of imagined arm movements in healthy elderly adults. Twelve young (mean age: 24.0 ± 1.3 years) and 12 elderly (mean age: 67.0 ± 4.5 years) participants executed and mentally simulated, with their right and left arms and as fast and as accurately as possible, arm pointing movements between three targets located in the frontal plane. We used the mental chronometry paradigm as an indicator of the accuracy of the motor imagery process (i.e. isochrony between executed and imagined movements) and t…
Brain representation of action observation in human infants.
2015
Imitative learning has long been established as extremely important for early development. However, neural mechanisms involved in early imitative behaviours are still areas of active research. Neurophysiological and brain-imaging studies have been recently performed that provide initial evidence of brain activation associated with action observation in the first months of life. In this review we examine all studies exploring the effects of action observation on brain function assessed by means of non-invasive brain-mapping techniques. Seventeen papers were selected as a result of our literature search. The strongest evidence for a neural signature of action observation comes from studies ex…
Interspecific Social Learning: Novel Preference Can Be Acquired from a Competing Species
2007
SummaryNongenetic transmission of behavioral traits via social learning allows local traditions in humans, and, controversially, in other animals [1–4]. Social learning is usually studied as an intraspecific phenomenon (but see [5–7]). However, other species with some overlap in ecology can be more than merely potential competitors: prior settlement and longer residence can render them preferable sources of information [8]. Socially induced acquisition of choices or preferences capitalizes upon the knowledge of presumably better-informed individuals [9] and should be adaptive under many natural circumstances [10, 11]. Here we show with a field experiment that females of two migrant flycatch…
The what and how of observational learning
2007
Abstract Neuroimaging evidence increasingly supports the hypothesis that the same neural structures subserve the execution, imagination, and observation of actions. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to investigate the specific roles of cerebellum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in observational learning of a visuomotor task. Subjects observed an actor detecting a hidden sequence in a matrix and then performed the task detecting either the previously observed sequence or a new one. rTMS applied over the cerebellum before the observational training interfered with performance of the new sequence, whereas rTMS applied over the DLPFC interfered with performa…
Human newborns match tongue protrusion of disembodied human and robotic mouths
2011
International audience; No evidence had been provided so far of newborns' capacity to give a matching response to 2D stimuli. We report evidence from 18 newborns who were presented with three types of stimuli on a 2D screen. The stimuli were video-recorded displays of tongue protrusion shown by: (a) a human face, (b) a human tongue from a disembodied mouth, and (c) an artificial tongue from a robotic mouth. Compared to a baseline condition, neonates increased significantly their tongue protrusion when seeing disembodied human and artificial tongue movements, but not when seeing a 2D full-face protruding tongue. This result was interpreted as revealing the exploration of top-heavy patterns o…