Imitation in Animals and Artifacts

The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals draws onfields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence, computer science, comparativepsychology, neuroscience, primatology, and linguistics. This volume represents a first step towardintegrating research from those studying imitation in humans and other animals, and those studyingimitation through the construction of computer software and robots.Imitation is of particularimportance in enabling robotic or software agents to share skills without the intervention of aprogrammer and in the more general context of interaction and collaboration between software agentsand humans. Imitation provides a way for the agent -- -whether biological or artificial--toestablish a "social relationship" and learn about the demonstrator's actions, in order toinclude them in its own behavioral repertoire. Building robots and software agents that can imitateother artificial or human agents in an appropriate way involves complex problems of perception,experience, context, and action, solved in nature in various ways by animals that imitate.

Chrystopher L. Nehaniv is co-organizer of the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshsire, England.