The evolution of imitation and mirror neurons in adaptive agents

Imitation is a highly complex cognitive process, involving vision, perception, representation, memory and motor control. The underlying mechanisms that give rise to imitative behavior have attracted a lot of attention in recent years and have been the subject of research in various disciplines, from neuroscience to animal behavior and human psychology. In particular, studies in monkeys and humans have discovered a neural mirror system that demonstrates an internal correlation between the representations of perceptual and motor functionalities. In contradistinction to previous engineering-based approaches, we focus on the evolutionary origins of imitation and present a novel framework for studying the evolution of imitative behavior. We successfully develop evolutionary adaptive agents that demonstrate imitative learning, facilitating a comprehensive study of the emerging underlying neural mechanisms. Interestingly, these agents are found to include a neural “mirror” device analogous to those identified in biological systems. Further analysis of these agents' networks reveals complex dynamics, combining innate perceptual-motor coupling with acquired context-action associations, to accomplish the required task. These findings may suggest a universal and fundamental link between the ability to replicate the actions of other (imitation) and the capacity to represent and match others' actions (mirroring).