Yet, why is implicit imitation dependent upon kinematics?
This result suggests that visual processing automatically induces related motor responses, namely, an implicit imitation of stimulus velocity.
Implicit imitation could represent the initial critical sensorimotor step on the basis of which higher levels of social interaction behaviours are built, through a combination of these low-level units.
The following discussion will consider the issues of implicit and explicit imitation and the origin of the visual stimulus (human- or computer- generated) in the imitation process.
In contrast, when observation precedes the pointing action, the cost function, i.e. the function to be minimized in the optimal control model, has to be weighted with external cues that may activate implicit mechanisms of action imitation.
In particular, the questions we want to answer are the following: 1) is the actual movement production influenced by the vision of a prior biological moving stimulus, leading to a spontaneous contamination? 2) If this is the case, what is the difference between implicit (automatic) and explicit (voluntary) imitation, and how sensitive are they to visual stimuli (abstract vs. human)?
The implications of this overlap have been a central topic in discussions of, among others, implicit memory and learning (Kosslyn and Moulton 2009), imitation (Hurley and Chater, eds. 2005; Meltzoff and Prinz, eds. 2002), and social understanding (Decety and Stevens 2009; Goldman 2006; Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008).
Interestingly, the linear relationship found between stimulus and participant movement velocities for both the implicit and explicit tasks suggests that automatic and voluntary imitations share a common mechanism where the optimal module (endogenously imposed) and imitation constraints (exogenously imposed) combine linearly.
Instead, in implicit condition, the mechanism combining the optimal response with imitation constraints would produce a clockwise rotation of the explicit regression line towards the horizontal line (corresponding to the optimal pointing velocity) as observed here.
By emphasizing difference, the implicit message is the need to bridge that gap via imitation: if only the global south were more like the north, then life would be better.
In other words, the observation and imitation of others is a powerful mode of implicit learning not because people can abstract in their brains what others are doing; rather, humans actually replicate the brain-body networks modeled by others.
