The Imitative Mind

Andrew N. Meltzoff studied psychology at Harvard and Oxford (D. Phil. 1976). He has been a full professor at the University of Washington since 1988. In 2000 he was named Director of the UW Center for Mind, Brain and Learning. Meltzoff is the recipient of a National Institute of Health Merit Award for outstanding research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and a foreign member of the Norwegian National Academy of Science and Letters. He is the co-author of Words, Thoughts and Theories (1997) and The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (1999). Wolfgang Prinz studied Psychology, Philosophy and Zoology at the University of Muenster, Germany. He took his Ph.D. in 1970 at the Dept. of Psychology at the University of Bielefeld (1975-1990) and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (1990-1998). Since 1990 he is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich. He has published empirical and theoretical work on perception, action, consciousness and attention as well as on the history of psychology.

• Part I. Introduction and Overview: 1. An interdisciplinary introduction to the imitative mind and brain Wolfgang Prinz and Andrew N. Meltzoff; Part II. Developmental and Evolutionary Approaches to Imitation: 2. Building blocks for a developmental theory of imitation Andrew N. Meltzoff; 3. Imitation and imitation recognition: functional use in preverbal infants and nonverbal children with autism Jacqueline Nadel; 4. Self-awareness, other-awareness, and secondary representation Jens B. Asendorpf; 5. Notes on individual differences and the assumed elusiveness of neonatal imitation Mikael Heimann; 6. Ego function of early imitation Philippe Rochat; 7. The imitator's representation of the imitated: ape and child A. Whiten; 8. Seeing actions as hierarchically organised structures: great ape manual skills Richard W. Byrne; Part III. Cognitive Approaches to Imitation, Body Scheme, and Perception-action Coding: 9. Experimental approaches to imitation Wolfgang Prinz; 10. Imitation: common mechanisms in the observation and execution of finger and mouth movements Harold Bekkering; 11. Goal-directed imitation Merideth Gattis, Harold Bekkering and Andreas Wolschläger; 12. Visuomotor couplings in object-orientated and imitative actions Stefan Vogt; 13. On bodies and events Barbara Tversky, Julie Bauer Morrison and Jeff Zacks; 14. What is the body schema? Catherine L. Reed; Part IV. Neuroscience Underpinnings of Imitation and Apraxia: 15. From mirror neurons to imitation: facts and speculations Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese; 16. Cell populations in the banks of the superior temporal sulcus of the macaque and imitation T. Jellema, C. I. Baker, M. W. Oram and D. I. Perrett; 17. Is there such a thing as a functional equivalence between imagined, observed, and executed action? Jean Decety; 18. The role of imitation in body ownership and mental growth Marcel Kinsbourne; 19. Imitation, apraxia, and hemisphere dominance Georg Goldenberg and Joachim Hermsdörfer.

Review of the hardback: 'Most of the book's merit is in the chapters themselves, most of which are skillfully written such that their relevance goes beyond the limits of the discipline at hand and illuminates issues relevant to neighboring disciplines as well. The two editors are leading figures in the fields of developmental and experimental psychology, and their respective research contributions blend well conceptually.' Nature Neuroscience