Psychology

Imitation cannot create a preeminence to do things it only develops and improves a power which already exists.  For instance, a child learns to write by imitating the freehand strokes of letters, but a child is able to do so with prior knowledge and rudimentary ability to make simple stick figures and doodles. This initial ability jump starts the imitative process. In general, learning by imitation is directly linked to the preexisting power of performing an action independently.

It is common knowledge that animals are devoid of personality, as they are creatures of impulse. They decide and act upon a certain instance devoid of freewill and emotions, and most of the time act solely for survival. An animal with congenital tendencies and a stereotyped environment has little power of learning by imitation. With regards to animal science, learning by imitation has been observed numerous times with monkeys because they have the greatest mental plasticity and aptitude for imitation. Monkeys are capable of learning by experience. They have a wide range of interest, and the readiest way to bring before their consciousness an action which interests them, is to reenact it themselves. Consequently, this makes them ceaselessly active in all aspects and eager to experiment in all sorts of ways. As a result, they learn rapidly by the success or failure of their attempts.

The discovery of mirror neurons has spurred a lot of attention in the area of neuroscience. Scientifically, mirror neurons have been implicated in the observation of others actions, imitation of certain actions, representation of the mental states of others, and the observation of emotions in others. Mirror neurons are classes of brain cells which become active when people perform an action and when they watch it being performed. To this date, monkeys are the only animals used to gain experimental data on mirror. For humans, the data revolves only on mirror regions, the brain sites which become active in brain imaging studies in cases of action observation and action execution when.

On some studies though, mirror regions or systems may be associated with imitation and language.
Upon studying mirror neurons on monkeys, it was discovered that mirror neuron response is limited only to transitive actions. In such case, mirror neurons can only support basic forms of imitation. This is referred to as emulation or stimulus facilitation. Caution should be taken when assuming a direct link between imitation and mirror neurons because in more complex situations or scenarios, additional brain circuitry may be necessary or may have evolved to develop a monkey-like mirror system.

In Kohlers research on 2002, he reported that some monkey mirror neurons respond to the observation and execution of the action of tearing a sheet of paper. Unbelievably, that response was not an ecological behavior repertoire of monkeys living in the wild. Thus a conclusion is made that it is most unlikely for mirror neurons to be inborn on monkeys. Consequently, Oztop and Arbib researched the developmental perspective of mirror neurons supposedly developed during infancy. They proposed the MNS model, which focused on the varying model levels of monkey mirror neuron system for grasping.

In the MNS model, the main hypothesis is that the temporal profile an infant experiences on self-executed grasps, like distance to the target object, provides the preexisting and training stimuli for the mirror neuron system to develop. Consequently, the development of mirror neurons by self-observation became the experimental and computational aspect of the research. Schemas were implemented to fully discern and dissect how developmental mirror neurons work. For instance, the inferior pre-motor cortex is classified into area F4 dominates the control of the reach component while area F5 dominates distal control. The simulated infant monkey is studied through training and testing.  In the training phase, the simulated monkey infant is designed to produce grasping actions in accordance to the motor code of F5 canonical neurons, and this code is used by the core mirror circuit to learn which hand-object visual is more likely corresponded to the canonically encoded grasps. In the testing phase, the network could actually recognize the grasp type from the visual features extracted during observation of a grasp action.

In 2005, MNS model was redefined into MNS2 model, where mirror neurons of the macaque brain were studied, and proved to be more biologically plausible than the previous model.

Experimental evidence supports associative learning mechanism. In humans, mirror system allows a respondent to respond by performing actions while observing another subjects actions. Likewise, monkey neurophysiology points to a reasonable model of mirror neuron systems which allows learning by imitation, through the activity of the so-called mirror neurons. With further research, scientists can discover more of the interaction in mirror neurons and perhaps enhance the learning capacity of monkeys.